New Democrat Update - February 2008
A SMART WAY TO BEAT THE TRAFFIC
Traffic jams are becoming a bigger problem. Between 1980 and 2004, metropolitan driving increased by 168 percent, while road miles grew by just 51 percent. Congestion costs Americans $60 billion in 2003 and it has only gone up since. Driving around any of the state’s urban areas confirms that Colorado is no exception.
State Sen. Chris Romer (D-Denver) has introduced an innovative solution to Interstate 70's growing weekend congestion problem. Under his plan, skiers could be charged up to $12 during rush hour on Saturday and Sunday or receive $25 for avoiding taking trips at that otherwise very busy time.
Congestion has increased for a number of reasons. The state’s population continues to grow. As incomes go up and the number of skiers rises, driving has become more affordable (in part, because cars are lasting longer). For the first time in history, over 90 percent of households own a car.
In addition, taxpayers are subsidizing driving - motor vehicle users pay only about 60 percent of public expenditures for highway infrastructure and services. If road capacity is treated as a free good (which it most definitely is not), motorists will always want more.
“Congestion pricing” would smooth demand and allocate peak capacity to those who value it highly enough to bear more of the cost of the burden they place on others. Skiers who value peak service would pay their fair share, and those who do not would shift to off-peak times and benefit from less traffic. "You're just reallocating money from those who are time-sensitive to those who are price-sensitive, and that's a perfect market-based solution," Romer told the Rocky Mountain News.
Congestion also increases the risk of accidents, driving up insurance costs. Vehicles idling in traffic burn more fuel and emit more pollutants than those flowing freely with the burdens falling disproportionately on other individuals who live near freeways and busy facilities. Future generations also pay a steep price, in the form of carbon emissions and global warming.
Public policy should learn from the private sector. Businesses use such pricing routinely to allocate perishable products characterized by cyclical demand like "early bird" discounts at restaurants and movies, rush-hour surcharges on taxi fares, and peak-load electricity premiums.
Due to the physics of congestion, it takes just a small decrease in peak driving to get a big reduction in delays. In London, congestion pricing has decreased traffic by 20 percent and boosted average speeds considerably.
Not unexpectedly, Romer’s proposal has received a rather chilly reception. While almost all economists and planners support the idea, voters oppose them, at least initially. The only thing they see is that someone is going to start charging them to drive.
Predictably, these types of plans generate opposition from those who will pay and little support from those likely to benefit. That indifference is a serious political obstacle because there are few who will fight to get congestion pricing started.
Despite those challenges, the alternatives pale in comparison. The state says it will take 5 to 10 years to widen I-70 and $5 billion to build a high-speed train line - with little reassurance that either proposal will loosen up traffic as cost-effectively.
Which is precisely why Democrats and everyone else should especially appreciate Romer’s willingness to lead and get this very needed conversation started - the very kind of risk-taking needed on another important public policy front.
RE-ENGINEERING GOVERNMENT’S DNA
People hear it and say it all the time. Getting good customer service from the public sector is like pulling teeth. Government managers and employees are only interested in increasing the size of their budgets, forget about getting the most value for every taxpayer buck.
Too often, the focus is on overly bureaucratic systems, obsessing over crossing every “t” and doting every “i,” rather than getting the results that taxpayers want and deserve. The work environment is generally one that encourages employees to be reactive, dependent, and fearful of taking too much initiative themselves. The overall feeling in the workplace is one of fear, blame, and defensiveness.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, wasteful bureaucrats are not the problem. The real culprits are dysfunctional organizational cultures.
Public agencies, like any other organization, are mini-societies with “rules” about what gets rewarded and what gets penalized. Their organizational cultures represent the values, norms, attitudes, and expectations of its leadership, "the way we do things around here,” otherwise known as a public agency’s DNA.
For example, if employees only hear from the boss when something goes wrong, there will be very little initiative and innovation because that requires taking risks which can often lead to failure. The more rational safer strategy is to keep one’s head low, try nothing new, and do it the way it has always been done. All of which results in managers and employees spending much of their time writing memos up the command chain to cover their backsides.
Discouraging risk-taking and innovation in government gets in the way of many progressive causes. Voters want public solutions to problems like health care, education and transportation but fear government will only squander their hard-earned money without making any real progress.
Public leaders, including elected officials, can re-engineer an organization’s DNA by changing the work conditions on the ground. With the right incentives, employees are much more likely to get it right in the long run because it will be in their own interest to do so. “Never tell people how to do things,” General George S. Patton said in 1944. “Tell them what you want them to achieve and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” Rewarding them - and tolerating reasonable mistakes - also helps.
Dan Loritz, a Minnesota college professor, uses an agricultural analogy. “A farmer goes out and spends a lot of time making sure that the fields are just right, gets all of the weeds out, plants the corn with great care, puts enough herbicides on it to make sure that there aren’t any weeds, and hopes that there’s enough water,” he says. “And if everything is right, the corn grows all by itself.” In other words, once the right conditions and incentives are in place, the desired results will soon follow.
Reinventing government guru David Osborne reinforces the point. “Reinventors use three approaches to reshape the culture; they mold the organization’s habits, hearts, and minds. They develop new habits by giving people new experiences - new kinds of work and interactions with new people. They reinforce these new behaviors by helping people shift their emotional commitments: their hopes, fears, and dreams. And they support this new emotional covenant by building a shared vision of the future, a new mental model of where the organization is going and how it will get there.”
As those who believe government has a vital role to play in society and in improving people’s lives, progressives have a special obligation to drive the quality of public services up and costs down. However, Democrats have too often ignored the issue.
Rewarding public managers and employees who are willing to take the risks to make government work more effectively must become part of what it means to be a Democrat. Think of it as a long-overdue needed change in our party’s “organizational culture.”