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Economists have long advocated congestion pricing as an efficient way of allocating scarce roadway capacity. However, with a few exceptions, congestion tolls are rarely used in practice and strongly opposed by the public and elected officials. Although high implementation costs and privacy issues are alleviated as appropriate technologies are developed, the concerns that congestion pricing will adversely affect low-income travelers remain. In this paper, we use a strategic transportation planning model calibrated for the Washington, DC, metropolitan area to compare the welfare and distributional effects of three pricing schemes: value pricing (HOT lanes), limited congestion pricing, and comprehensive congestion pricing. We find that social welfare gains from HOT lanes amount to three-quarters of those from the comprehensive road pricing. At the same time, a HOT lanes policy turns out to be much more equitable than other road pricing schemes, with all income groups strictly benefiting even before the toll revenue is recycled.

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We analyze a 2002 survey of Southern California residents to evaluate the relative importance of factors that affect workers' propensity to telecommute and telecommuting frequency. The survey collected a wealth of individual demographic information as well as job type, industry, and employer characteristics from about 5,000 residents. In agreement with previous studies, we find that the propensity to telecommute is increasing with worker age and educational attainment. At the same time, we conclude that the propensity to telecommute depends to a large extent on a worker's job characteristics and that the quantitative effects of job characteristics are at least as important as demographic factors.We also study what factors affect telecommuting frequency based on a one-week commuting diary of the telecommuters in the survey. The industry and occupation categories that play a significant role in affecting propensity to telecommute do not have similar effects on telecommuting frequency. On the contrary, some other job-related factors show substantial influences.