Congestion Pricing Keeps Working-Class Surfers Out of the Breaks Their Tax Dollars Maintain
New York’s Congestion Toll and California’s Highway Pricing Experiments Raise the Cost of Getting to Public Beaches for the Commuters Who Can Least Afford the Premium
LOS ANGELES / NEW YORK – The California Department of Transportation has been studying value-pricing approaches for major highway corridors as a congestion management and revenue generation strategy. New York City’s congestion pricing scheme charges $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street. Both represent the application of market pricing principles to highway access – which is, in the abstract, the kind of price signal that economists generally endorse as a more efficient alternative to rationing road capacity through congestion. The problem from the surf community’s perspective is specific: the highway to the beach is the highway to the beach, and the price of using it – whether through congestion tolls, parking fees, or park day-use charges – is a cumulative cost of accessing a public resource that surfers from lower-income communities cannot easily absorb without it becoming a meaningful constraint on access frequency.
The surfer in Venice Beach who needs the Pacific Coast Highway to reach Malibu or Zuma, the Inland Empire surfer whose beach access requires driving the 405 or the 60 to the coast, the surfer in the San Fernando Valley whose session depends on the Sunday morning PCH – all of these surfers are subject to a system of transportation pricing whose costs accumulate across parking, highway tolls (where applicable), and access fees in ways that raise the effective cost of surfing above what the ocean itself charges, which is nothing. This is not a trivial point. The cultural claim of surfing as a democratic sport – open to anyone willing to put in the effort and accept the ocean’s conditions – depends on the physical accessibility of surf breaks to anyone who wants to reach them.
The Economics of Access Pricing
The Foundation for Economic Education has noted that while congestion pricing is theoretically efficient as a mechanism for managing scarce road capacity, its distributional effects are regressive in the same way as other flat-rate access charges: lower-income users spend a larger proportion of their income on highway tolls than higher-income users, and the behavioral change that prices are intended to induce – switching to public transit or shifting travel times – is more readily available to flexible, higher-income users than to workers with fixed schedules and limited transit alternatives. The Southern California surfer driving to Malibu at 5am on a Saturday is not contributing to peak-hour congestion; they are exercising the kind of off-peak, recreation-motivated travel that transportation economists identify as exactly the traffic type that congestion pricing should be leaving undisturbed. Designing pricing systems that distinguish between the weekend dawn-patrol surfer and the weekday rush-hour commuter is technically possible but politically unlikely to be implemented at the granularity required.
The broader principle at stake is the relationship between price and access to public goods. Roads and the beaches they lead to are public goods paid for through general taxation that all residents contribute to regardless of income. Layering additional access prices on top of the taxes that fund these goods converts them from genuine public goods into goods that are public in their funding but private in their effective access – available to anyone who can pay both the tax and the toll. The libertarian tradition’s critique of this arrangement is not that roads should be unpriced or that congestion should be unmanaged; it is that the costs of public goods should be recovered through the taxes that fund them rather than through additional charges that convert them into effectively private goods for everyone below the income threshold at which the combined cost becomes prohibitive.
The congestion pricing discussion also opens into the larger question of transportation planning and who gets to make decisions about how transportation infrastructure is designed, priced, and maintained. The surfer’s interest in road access to beaches is a specific subset of the broader public interest in transportation infrastructure that serves all users rather than optimizing for peak-hour commuters in ways that impose costs on recreational users and off-peak travelers. The libertarian case for market-based transportation pricing is consistent and internally coherent; its implementation in ways that preserve public access to public recreational resources requires the kind of nuanced design that market mechanisms alone do not automatically produce. Building the coalition that can demand that nuance – that separates the legitimate efficiency gains of congestion pricing from the regressive access implications of flat-rate recreational tolling – requires the surf community to engage with transportation policy in a more sustained and sophisticated way than it has historically.
The congestion pricing and access fee issues together point toward a fundamental question about California’s social contract with its residents regarding public goods. The state’s founding promise – embodied in the Coastal Act, in the public parks system, in the free beach access tradition – was that the ocean and the land leading to it belonged to all Californians equally. The accumulation of fees, tolls, and access charges is gradually qualifying that promise: the ocean remains nominally public, but the cost of reaching it is being progressively privatized through the revenue-generating mechanisms of state and local government. The surf community should be among the most vocal defenders of the original promise, both because it is the community most directly affected by its erosion and because surfing’s cultural mythology – the free wave, the democratic break, the ocean as commons – is the mythology that the access principle is built on.
For more analysis of freedom and markets visit Foundation for Economic Education. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
