As commenters here have noted, devotees of congestion pricing — the concept behind toll lanes on Hwy. 394 and (soon) I-35W — come from both sides of the aisle. The Bush administration’s fondness for highway tolls as user fees that shift road maintenance costs to drivers is only one version of the story, says Lee Munnich, a senior fellow at the Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs who has studied (PDF) the MNPASS program on 394. In an interview with Minnesota Monitor, Munnich pointed to the DFL’s big role in the state’s toll lane projects, as well as the appeal that congestion pricing has held for both right- and left-leaning governments around the world.

Continued: Click “Read more”Paternalistic, statist Singapore instituted an early window-tag version of congestion pricing in 1974, based on the work of Nobel laureate William Vickery. The idea gained adherents locally in the wake of a Met Council study by economist Herbert Mohring in 1994, as wireless technology began to make toll booths obsolete. Elsewhere, this decade has seen Sweden’s Green Party demand congestion pricing as a precondition to cooperating with the Social Democratic government. The idea caught on with London’s Labor Party Mayor “Red Ken” Livingstone as well as Michael Bloomberg, the formerly Republican mayor of New York, where a proposed fee to be paid by vehicles entering the city is tangled in a post-Spitzer legislative mess that has to be resolved before end of session at the close of this month. Another exception to the post-ideological embrace on congestion pricing may be San Francisco — like Minneapolis, a beneficiary of Bush’s Urban Partnership program that ties transit funding to new tolls on roads. Citizens in the Bay Area stopped an elevated freeway dead in its tracks, and may prove willing to fight over the the political question of how we should pay for our highways.

 The 35W toll plan, with “dynamic pricing” based on congestion levels, differs from models in which the cost of an entire stretch of roadway is paid through tolls. The proposed toll lanes between Burnsville and downtown Minneapolis will be in effect a premium “fast lanes” for those willing and able to pony up the additional cost of getting places more quickly–a philosophical add-on to the concept of reserving exclusive use of the premium lane on the left for car-poolers and buses as a conservation gesture. Indeed, Knute Berger at Crosscut.com discerns Machiavelli in the selling of congestion pricing in Seattle — another Urban Partnership town — and around the world.