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.
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.
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.
