Letting the Market Drive Transportation

A New Focus on Tolls

Tyler Duvall was on his way to a departmental retreat in 2006 when he hit 25 miles of traffic on Interstate 270. At the retreat, the Bush administration officials agreed that congestion should be the focus of their remaining time in office.

Since the 1990s, the Department of Transportation (DOT) has spent about $10 million a year to study tolls. Inspired by the writings of economist and Nobel laureate William Vickrey, considered the "father" of congestion pricing, Duvall decided it was time to crank up that work. Polling data said the public was fed up with traffic and willing to try something new.

"We thought, let's expand and let every state try congestion pricing," he said.

When Democrats took control of Congress and stripped most earmarks from last year's federal budget, Peters took $850 million that would have been shipped to hundreds of municipalities and poured it into Urban Partnerships, a pilot program awarded to five cities on the condition that they test congestion pricing.

The focus on toll roads alarmed the transit industry, which argues that public transportation is the best way to fight gridlock in cities. Industry leaders say the DOT has made it increasingly difficult for expensive rail projects to qualify for federal dollars. The number of major new rail and bus projects on track for federal funding dropped from 48 in 2001 to 17 in 2007, even as transit ridership hit a 50-year high last year and demand for new service is soaring.

William Millar, who heads the American Public Transportation Association, says he set up three appointments with Duvall to try to influence how the Urban Partnership money would be spent, but each was cancelled. "They just see no role for transit," Millar said.

Duvall, 35, is a fourth-generation Washingtonian whose father is a well-connected lawyer. He had no transportation experience when he was plucked from his job handling corporate mergers and acquisitions at Hogan & Hartson and was offered a political appointment at the DOT in 2002. "It was a friend of a friend of a friend sort of thing," he said.

Within four years, he was setting national policy.

Tall and lanky, Duvall is a kinetic intellectual who talks animatedly about pricing theories and e-mails stray thoughts to colleagues in the middle of the night. In his office, he keeps a bust of Dwight D. Eisenhower, father of the interstate system. One recent day, he was reading a paperback copy of Barry Goldwater's book "The Conscience of a Conservative," lent to him by Peters.

Fans say Duvall savors a good policy debate; critics call him an ideologue who doesn't know how to compromise. All acknowledge his influence on major DOT initiatives and statements.

"Tyler Duvall is a little pointy-headed neocon with grand ideas about the future of transportation, and they all involve tolling," DeFazio said. "He's bright, young, energetic -- just totally wrong, and has a bizarre, neocon view of transportation."

Soon after Duvall arrived at the DOT as a "schedule C" -- the lowest-level political appointee -- Peters asked him to interview for the job of general counsel at the Federal Highway Administration. He lost out to another lawyer -- D.J. Gribbin.