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RSS FeedPico y Placa – Is Washington DC ready to tackle traffic congestion?
Congestion pricing (also known as variable tariff and dynamic pricing) is a mechanism to charge different amounts for traffic at different times. As a simple example, you may have to pay 2$ for using a road at peak hours, and it may cost you only 1$ (or be free) at non-peak hours. Washington DC metro uses the same concept, although they have more than two tiers and have the dreaded peak of the peak charge as well. Airlines and hotels use the same concept, with their prices being computed similarly through a demand and supply mechanism. Generally speaking, congestion pricing is a good mechanism for passenger traffic, compared to appointment scheduling and network capacity management, which is usually used in freight traffic management systems, for example, NX FTMS.
However, congestion pricing (charging more) does not work, if you are not setup to charge anything at all! So a different mechanism is used at times – the one to only allow some vehicles on the roads. This is typically known as road space rationing. For example, you could choose to allow only blue cars on the road at one day, and the red cars on the road another day. Oh wait, you can’t actually do that as that appears to be politically motivated. So, let us try again. You can try to allow the cars that have the last digit of the license plate numbers odd on the road on one day, and the cars for which the last digit is even on another day. Then, you can turn those digits and days around as you wish to make sure that the system is fair and not gameable (and you may need to have some provision for vanity plates).
The best example of this that I have come up is in Bogota, where the system is called pico y placa, which combines the peak traffic hour (pico) also with the license plata (placa), although the peak hours have since 2009 been extended to almost the entire day (6 am to 8 pm). Knowing Bogota’s traffic, I think that is a fair characterization of the peak hour. The way the system works is that cars with number plates ending in 5, 6, 7 or 8 cannot driving between 6 AM and 8 PM on Mondays. Last digits for other days are:
- 9012: Tuesday
- 3456: Wednesday
- 7890: Thursday
- 1234: Friday
There are no restrictions on the weekends.
So, firstly we observe that if you have two cars, one ending in 5 and the other ending in 0, then you have at least one good car every day. So, the people with means try to have two cars with different number plates. For that reason, the Bogota pico y placa changes the digits every year. So, it is theoretically possible that your good combination may not be that good next year. However, based on my understanding of Bogotá pico y placa, the digits are always in contiguous blocks of 4, so if your two license plates end in 0 and 5, then you are perpetually safe. If my understanding is correct, then that is a limitation of the system, and the numbers should be mixed up more thoroughly. To put in perspective though, that limitation is small as only a limited number of people buy two cars to circumvent the system.
Could pico y placa work in DC?
Granted, we would have to call it peak and plate here, but could the concept work? For about 8 months of 2011 I participated in ride share program wherein me and my ride share partner would drive during alternate weeks, to take advantage of the HOV restriction on I-66. The ride share program works as is, and there is even a full slugging system in DC, but if there were more people participating in ride share programs, that would perhaps be easier to find people leaving from and going to same places, and the ride share could really work even better. Participation would of course be almost mandated by peak and plate in DC.
Although WMATA stopped trying to be price-competitive a very long time ago, it is even possible that due to increased ridership, even the metro fares may come down a little. (For a visual on how high metro fares suppresses ridership which raises fares, consider this.)
After a lengthy preamble, here is a question for you:
Could Peak and Plate system work in Washington DC?
- Might work (63%, 290 Votes)
- No chance - people will find ways around (31%, 144 Votes)
- It would work really well! (6%, 26 Votes)
- What's Peak and Plate again? (0%, 3 Votes)
Total Voters: 463
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May 12, 2012 at 4:50 AM
I enjoyed reading your nice post. Stumbled by chance but I’m sure glad I did. Definitely answered some of the questions I’ve been trying to answer for some time now.
June 23, 2012 at 8:07 PM
I have been living in Bogota for past two years with my wife who is Colombian and we as most of our friends have two cars fro the very reason on pico y placa!!! This is insane system, that completely does not work for the very reason that we and everybody I know has two cars. The system benefits car salesmen only. The problem in Bogota is that there is no viable public transportation to commute to work without owning a car. Taxis theoretically could be an option if you it were possible to get a taxi in the morning when it is time to go to work or in the evening when it is time to go home. Getting a call service taxi is IMPOSSIBLE at those times. Yes, you can get a taxi on the street but that is the best way to get robbed. So no, this is NOT the model for DC. I think asking IBM to help structure a perimeter that defines the center of DC as was done in London ot Krakow or Stockholm and charging per entry via electronic cameras is the best way to limit traffic in city center. Forget about pico y placa! I have just returned from a full day shopping for new car because the idiotic numbers changed and we met a few friends doing the same thing, and most of the volume at dealerships is driven by that. When you go to a dealer and they have a list of cars, the licence plate is the most important information on the list. In fact you get absurdities now like car millage is less important than the licence plate!! Like i said, forget about it.
June 26, 2012 at 1:03 PM
Pawel, Those are excellent comments! I am fascinated to hear that most of the volume at car dealerships is driven by that. Qué curioso, ¿no?
Charging per entry via electronic cameras is indeed very non-intrusive (or it may be intrusive in a different sense), but it may still be an easier sell than using passive RFID tags or active ezpass like transponders.
July 18, 2012 at 11:48 PM
There are affordable approaches which can reduce traffic congestion and boost public transport service capacity in a foreseeable timeframe, across large cities.
In numerous cities the emphasis continues to be on strategies that deliver too little too late at the expense of more affordable alternatives.
This conclusion and the alternative approaches are articulated in an eBook I have recently written (titled “Watch the Road: Solving Transport Issues in Sprawling Cities, Sooner Rather than Later”). For more about the eBook see: http://www.transportstrategies.info.
This focuses in particular on the role of the road network as being pivotal not peripheral to delivering major new public transport service networks.
It establishes why the approach would be feasible, including from an affordability perspective and in respect of improved traffic flows.
The key element is the large-scale expansion of bus networks and services, beyond current proposals, to operate metro-wide on the existing road system.
While the use of existing roads might sound counterintuitive, the fact is that as long as the new service networks are comprehensive enough, then they can attract sufficient car users to ease traffic congestion overall!
A large metropolis might have a million or more cars on its roads in peak hours, but usually only a few thousand buses ply that same road network. But if the bus to car mix is increased sufficiently, amazing things can happen.
Historically car growth has outstripped bus service growth, which exacerbates congestion.
Current bus initiatives don’t go far enough, so new bus services struggle against a rising tide of congestion. By turning that trend around, congestion can be controlled.