by Robert W. Poole Jr.

By now it’s pretty clear that most of America’s major urban areas hope to implement region-wide networks of priced (“managed”) lanes on their freeway systems. Plans for such networks exist in places as small as Minneapolis/St. Paul and as large as greater Los Angeles. The greatest challenge in implementing such networks is not political acceptance; far more difficult will be paying for these vitally important networks. And most transportation planners have not faced up to the kinds of trade-offs this will involve.