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Transportation scholars regularly argue that congestion pricing is the only reliable way to reduce road traffic congestion. The public often resists this advice, often out of confusion about how pricing would work, concern about whether it would be fair, and a belief that some other, less politically-explosive approach might work just as well. This explanatory essay addresses some of those common concerns.

Why do voters choose to raise their own taxes for public transportation? Should we expect this political willingness to finance to transit to change travel behavior? This project examines those questions by analyzing Measure M, the sales tax increase that LA County voters approved by ballot in 2016. Measure M was designed to be transformative, and help make LA a more multimodal region. I show first that this goal is ambitious: LA differs greatly from the American regions where transit use is more common. I then use two original surveys to examine the reasons for Measure M's support. I find that the reasons for supporting Measure M were often partisan, and/or related to beliefs about transit's ability to improve social problems. Supporters of Measure M exhibit little appetite for riding transit, and little interest in the complementary policies (more density, less parking, congestion charging) that would make new transit investments more effective.

This article estimates the effect of bundled residential parking—parking whose price is included in the rent or purchase price of housing—on household vehicle ownership. Using data from the American Housing Survey, I show that the odds of households with bundled parking being vehicle-free are 50–75 percent lower than the odds of households without bundled parking, while households in dense center cities near transit are twice as likely to be without vehicles if they lack bundled parking. I also find substantial, though less stable, evidence that bundled parking encourages driving among commuters who have vehicles. These results are robust to a wide variety of demographic and land-use controls and to controls for residential self-selection. Examining self-selection shows that housing without bundled parking is sufficiently scarce and geographically concentrated that people who search for it may not find it. Four metropolitan areas, which hold 11 percent of U.S. housing units, hold more than 40 percent of its housing without bundled parking. Overall, the results suggest that when cities require parking with residential development, they increase vehicle ownership and use.

Cities often require developers to widen streets or make other transportation improvements to account for the traffic impacts of new building. This article examines one parcel-level traffic mitigation law in depth—the highway dedication ordinance of the city of Los Angeles. I first show that the law emerged from a combination of happenstance and political and fiscal constraints, not from persuasive evidence it would be effective. I then show that the traffic predictions underlying the law are often inaccurate, and that, in fact, the standards the law is based on are in some ways unverifiable. Thus the law likely does little to reduce congestion and probably impedes housing development. Finally, I argue that the law persists precisely because its desired outcome is hard to verify: Without measurable goals, planners fall back on a measurable process. Parcel-level traffic mitigation becomes an exercise not in reducing traffic but in ensuring that developers carry out mitigations, regardless of whether those mitigations are effective.