If it is some fake currency, say, HOV-credits, that is distributed on a monthly basis, equally, to everyone, then to a first approximation, you're providing for equivalence in capacity to pay. You can choose to spend, or not spend, your HOV-credits, on any given day.

This also offers the opportunity for rationing, as it's possible to increase or decrease the allocations based on net usage.

If the credits expire after some time, say a few months, then there's the ability to bank them, but not indefinitely. This is not a form of perpetual wealth accumulation.

The argument could be made for either making the credits transferable, so that those less wealthy in other regards could sell them for other units of trade, or not, and/or to set limits on such transactions.

All of this occurs independent of actual currency, though there would be an overall budget to the programme.

And it accomplishes the goal of setting an opportunity cost to highway travel, and congestion, which could itself be varied according to circumstances (higher charges at peak hours / during high-congestion events, lower off-peak or when uncongested).

Then there's the question of interactions with alternative transit, telecommute, or similar schemes.

1) If your roads are being overused you can easily ration that by raising the dollar price.

2) What is wrong with wealth accumulation? If credit recipients would rather do that than drive on roads they should be able to do so. They's how they get less poor!

3) If they credits are transferable then you are effectively giving people money. Just in an ass-backwards and overly confusing way.

All depends on what problem you are trying to solve.

IMO, the problem is "how do we allocate road so that high utility use gets precedent over low value use, without defining high/low value as 'rich/poor person wants to get from a to b'"

Expiring credits is an idea, as are a lot of options. Designed markets are a devil-in-the-detail endevours. A market is a good tool for this job, that's why economists and wonks like tolls. But, not every market needs to be the market. In this case, The Market is probably worse than the no market free-for-all.

Raising the HOV-units price provides equal purchasing capacity amongst all drivers.

I mentioned the option of transferability for completeness. I'm not advocating for or against it. I am noting that it would change the dynamics somewhat.

Your #2 is a rather more involved and tangential discussion. Historically, it has a strong tendency to end in tears, or worse.

3) You're giving them things that cost you nothing to produce which they can then sell for money.

I actually think this was a bit of an aha moment for me re: cryptocurrency and government.

It's possible for a government to setup a market for a public good, create a currency for that good and distribute that currency equally to people. All without spending actual currency(ignoring administrative costs of setting up a blockchain).

The value of the public good for people then determines the USD exchange rate, but poor people are never excluded from using the good and at the same time you are not massively inflating the money supply.

edit. In fairness, nothing about this requires a cryptocurrency/blockchain. It's more a general argument in favor of governments charging for public goods by creating custom (maybe fiat) currencies which they distribute equally to all citizens.

There might be administrative and/or psychological benefits to running all these custom currencies on blockchains.

Setting up a traffic-ration system fairly is probably a lot simpler than giving poor people money.

I disagree. We have all the technology and processes we could ever need to distribute and charge people dollars for things.

Creating a whole new kind of currency with its own special rules is a huge undertaking. Not to mention the ongoing pain-in-the ass cost to every citizen when they have to carry around and think about a new special kind of money that can only be used for one thing.

The tech isn't the problem, it's that the avalibility distribution that is imposed on roads is the same as the income distribution. In a way it creates the same problems as removing net neutrality.

If you did that with roads, what's stopping the upper income distribution from excluding everyone else from entire cities? A gated community concept might scale to an entire upperclass city with a private airport, hostpital, and 1000$ entry fee to keep out the poor. This might even effectively reduce overall costs for the municipality since homeless and property crime would be greatly reduced.

On the other hand if other currency is used, it makes everyone easily trackable.

I think the dumb pipes model still has some advantages.

> it makes everyone easily trackable.

zkSNARKs for the rescue! It's surprisingly easy to roll with that. (See Zcash, Monero, ETH and whatever.)

There are simple and effective (from a traffic-flow-control perspective) solutions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramp_meter

I'd focus more on one of my other punts above: ways of drawing a correspondence between traffic and congestion, on the one hand, and alternative transit options (buses, rail, cycling, telecommuting, etc.) on the other. Market pricing signals fail to provide the coordination many of these options require. Typically, planning-based approaches are required.

> alternative transit options

I like driving, but I'm very bad at managing the stress associated with owning a car, finding a parking spot, sitting in congestion, trying to be there in time (speeding to gain a few minutes that makes no sense), hence I don't have a car.

And I wouldn't live in a place that requires one.

And I can't understand how the US is so deep in the hole with regards to mass transit / public transport, commute time, etc.

Sure, I know, it's a classic coordination problem, and I'm probably very biased by having access to a very cheap and efficient public transit network.

Finding a parking spot is usually not an issue for US citizens since we mandate lots of parking through zoning laws.

The problem in this case is not really "not enough money" in an absolute sense. To use the fast lane in a floating price system, you need to outbid the rest of the people. IE it's a function of income distribution.

You'd need to solve inequality. That's a great thing to do, but meanwhile we can just fix fast lanes separately. ...just in case inequality still exists in 10 years.

The issue here is that you are prioritizing using "the fast lane in a floating price system" as the most important thing when for a lot of people that will not be the case.

They might rather spend that money on housing, or education or chewing gum or who the hell knows what.

The utility maximizing choice it to let them make their own decision as they know more about their preferences than you do. You making that decision for them destroys utility.

(op)

I don't know why the downvotes, you make valid points.

I think what you say is true, but not in the context of this specific scenario. This scenario starts with a public good that is freely available to all.

In the free-for-all, everyone has equal access to the good. The total value of that is somewhat diminished in theory, because the lack of a price system causes overconsumption ... traffic jams.

In the price system, there is a luxury option. In principle, options are good. If you really want to travel fast, you can for a price. In practice though (because income distribution), most of that negotiation does not happen within one person debating if he really wants that fast lane today. There will be some people (wealthy) for whom it is almost always worthwhile and others for whom it is never worthwhile.

What I am arguing is that calling this highest value use is just false.

Choice here does not extend to substitutes. You don't get anything for taking the slow lane.

This is why I'd like to see some less theoretically pure economists tinker with this. It's possible to create a system where what you say is true. This one is impractical, but one example could be a system where fast lane drivers pay slow lane drivers. Ie, negative pricing.

Maybe you earn fast lane credits for taking the slow lane, to be used in lieu of £40. That way all commuters get a taste.

Seems to me that increasing the toll price with increasing levels of road usage would be the best way to ensure that those of lesser means still have access to the express roadway.

Example: Using the express roadway once a month is $10/use. Using it 100 times is 50/use.

This is similar to how California tries to restrict water usage by the wealthy.

> "Maybe you earn fast lane credits for taking the slow lane"

This does nothing to help fund roads or alleviate congestion.