The Eclipse: How Markets Could Have Prevented the “Traffic Nightmare”

After the eclipse, access to major roadways should have been priced according to highway capacity and demand:

[W]ere there market-based, controlled access to the major roadways, access in the first hour after the eclipse could have been priced very high, and would therefore have limited access to those who really wanted to leave as soon as possible. It may even be that a toll of, say, fifty dollars may have been sufficient to convince many thousands of travelers to wait an hour or two before departing. Rather than spend fifty dollars, many might have elected to simply play card games for an hour, visit local shopping areas, or have a meal in town. (In Scottsbluff, Nebraska, where I took in the eclipse, restaurants and shops were hardly overflowing with people.)

An hour after the eclipse ended, the highways could then have been opened up to travelers willing to pay, say, thirty dollars to get on highways. At this point, more travelers would be willing to pay the toll, and would have departed at that time.

 

As it actually played out, many travelers simply rushed to crowd onto the highways in the hopes of “beating the traffic” since access was equally “free” for everyone, and distributed on a first-come, first-served basis. Except what we ended up with was far worse than a “first-come, first-served” situation since access to the highways wasn’t closed once the highways were at full capacity. The highways remained upon even after reaching capacity, meaning that, in many areas, traffic came to a complete standstill.

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3:12 pm on August 22, 2017