The term iron law of freeway congestion has been coined to describe this pattern. We need to make more efficient use of our existing transportation assets. The effort to serve peak period demand by constructing more capacity is very expensive. Businesses that face similar peaks and troughs of customer demand have devised pricing systems designed to make more efficient use of their assets. Movie theaters, for example, have lower prices for matinees than for prime time shows.
Hotels have lower prices for off-season visitors.
These are sound strategies for making the best use of limited resources. If we had any sense, we d be using these kinds of strategies in our road and transit systems. Rather than hiking taxes and pumping more money into roads and transit lines, we should be making more efficient use of the assets we already have. This would entail imposing surcharges on those who use the roads during peak periods and giving discounts to those who shift their demand to off-peak periods. In the past, it could ve been argued that it was impractical to try differential pricing for use of the roads.