▶ Your Answer :
People who have a car would feel the same frustration these days when they drive their car. Because too many cars on the road, congestion problems are ordinary phenomenon and it is not easy to solve the problem. Some people try to solve the problem by charging fees to heavy traffic, but many people oppose the opinion. However, I think this is actually one of the best solutions based on two reasons.
First of all, price differentiation is one of the efficient ways to solve the congestion problem. If there is high demand and low supply, it is ordinary that the price go higher than before. This is natural situation in nations which are based on capitalism. As an example, movie tickets in weekend are more expensive than those of weekdays because more people want to watch movies and tickets are limited. Another example is the price of hotel. Even if people stay at the same night in the same hotel, the price of rooms is different based on the location of rooms; rooms with better scenery charges higher than ordinary rooms. Likewise, charging higher price to something that is more popular than others is not unreasonable. In this manner, charging with higher congestion to drivers is surely reasonable decision. As the price goes higher, fewer drivers would drive the area of heavy traffic, finally reducing the traffic problem.
In addition, based on the revenue that drivers paid due to the congestion, governments can invest to intrastructure for solving traffic problems. Since governments have to distribute their budgets to many kinds of problems, using much money to enhance the heavy traffic problem would not be easy. If governments can charge for congestion, they can not only reduce the traffic problems but also gain fees. Since these fees are gathered by drivers, there is no reason to invest the money to problems other than the congestion problem. Drivers who paid for congestion can easily understand if the money they paid is used for improvement of traffic problems. Therefore, charging congestion fees to drivers would be a good way to both reduce the traffic problem and earn money for investment to the traffic problem. Heavy traffic problem is not easy to solve, but there may exist a way to reduce it. Pricing to drivers is one of them. It can reduce the traffic based on the theory of supply and demand, and the money that is earned by the fees can be used to improve the traffic condition, which can clearly enhance the traffic problem. |