[sustran] Economist magazine on road pricing

[Paul Barter]

This came from the alt-transp list:

The cover story of the current issue of The Economist
(http://www.economist.com) is devoted to roads. Not only is the coverage
(pretty) good, it bodes well for the future -- this magazine leads other
newspapers and magazine, and likely we will see similar stories in other
papers.

They set the tone with "enormous local damage (in terms of pollution,
noise, ugliness, and wasted time)."

They acknowledge induced demand "buried under concrete in a vain attempt
to tackle congestion" and "the demand for travel is nowhere near to
being sated."

Their solution: charge for road space.

Peter Jacobsen
Pasadena, California


Here's the text of their leader, but I encourage alt-transp readers to
check out several other related articles:

Jam today, road pricing tomorrow

Road pricing

FEW affairs have been more passionate
in the 20th century than that between
man and his motor car. The car has
allowed millions to travel where they
will, in comfort and security, at a time
of their own choosingótruly, it has
revolutionised peopleís lives. The car
is not just an aspect of modernity, it is a
precondition for it. Owning a car remains a goal for
millions of poor people in every part of the worldóand
therefore, ideally, the affair should have continued for
decades undisturbed. Unfortunately, it is not to be.

For years people have understood that the car was a
cherished but dangerous thing. As one British inquiry put
it in the 1960s, ìWe are nourishing at immense cost a
monster of great potential destructiveness.î The truth of
that warning is all too apparent in the horribly polluted
and congested streets of European, American and Asian
cities.

Road transport accounts for about a quarter of the
man-made gases that may be contributing to global
warming, about which hands are being wrung in Kyoto
this week. Actually, the role cars play in global warming
is not the pressing question. More important, and more
certain, is the enormous local damage (in terms of
pollution, noise, ugliness and wasted time) caused by
traffic congestionóand the great cost of the orthodox
solution to that problem, which has been to keep on
building roads.

Queue or pay

Cars in America may be 90% cleaner than they were a
generation ago, but this improvement has been largely
wiped out by growth. More and more rural areas are
being buried under concrete in a vain attempt to tackle
congestion on motorways and other major routes. Matters
will deteriorate because the demand for travel is
nowhere near to being sated. As economies grow, so
does traffic. Governments understand this, and know that
building roads is unpopular and offers no solution in
congested areas. What then are they to do?

The underlying problem is clear enough: cheap
car-travel has been based on an illusion. Only by making
drivers pay for the costs they impose on society can the
demand for motoring be brought into line with restricted
supply. The choice for drivers is simple: queue or pay.

If roads continue to be operated as one of the last relics
of a Soviet-style command economy, then the
consequence will be worsening traffic jams and eventual
Bangkok-style gridlock. If, on the other hand, roads were
priced like any other scarce commodity, better use would
be made of existing space and the revenues raised could
be used to improve public transport. The mere fact of
making motorists pay their way would free capacity to
such an extent that bus travel would become easier and
faster, and subsidies could be reduced.

Politicians have long shied away from this approach
because it is difficult to persuade voters to pay for
something that has long been free. But some governments
are starting to accept that there may be no alternative.
Charging for ownership rather than use, as most tax
systems do, makes little sense. Heavy fixed costs,
including vehicle duties, insurance and depreciation,
merely encourage drivers to use their cars more because
the perceived marginal costs of motoring are so small.
The way forward must be to make cars more expensive
to use.

Higher fuel duties are often suggested as a way of doing
this. But increasing the price of petrol and diesel for all
motorists is very crude. It makes no sense to penalise a
rural motorist driving along empty country roads when
the problem lies in cities and on congested motorways.
Road pricing, adjusted for place and time, can, by
contrast, be fixed precisely to reduce congestion.
Motorists driving through city rush-hour traffic would
see on their in-car meters that they were being charged
peak rates. The same journey made during the early hours
of the morning in uncongested streets would attract a
much smaller charge or perhaps no charge at all.

Improving public transport is another frequently
proposed alternative to road pricing. If only the buses,
underground systems and railways worked cheaply and
efficiently, then motorists would leave their cars at
home. All the evidence, sadly, suggests otherwise. One
European study found that halving bus fares would
reduce car use by less than 1%. Drivers are so wedded
to their cars that they will be deterred only by higher
motoring costs or regulation.

Critics claim that road pricing would merely displace
traffic on to side roads, and that it would infringe privacy
(because driversí movements are recorded). New forms
of charging provide answers. Technology makes it
possible to track vehicles via satellite to make sure that
rat-runners do not escape charges. Even without that
innovation, if charges merely diffused congestion by
spreading traffic-peaks through time, the resulting
ìdisplacementî would be a good thing. Minor roads can
meanwhile be protected by regulation. As for privacy,
only charge-evaders need have a picture of their licence
plate taken as they pass by.

Politics, not technology, remains the real barrier to the
widespread introduction of charging. Some countries
have made a start (see article). In others, politicians are
still terrified that their car-owning voters will savage
any government that tries to introduce direct measures of
restraint. But where pricing has been introduced, as in
Scandinavia, it has proved effective and popular. Those
who argue that road pricing is unfair because it
discriminates against the poor ignore the fact that people
too poor to own a vehicle, together with the young and
the very old, suffer the ill-effects of congestion without
the benefits of personal mobility. Moreover, if the
revenues were used to improve public transport, the poor
would benefit disproportionately.

If road pricing is to be made politically acceptable, both
the methods of charging and the use of the revenues must
be easily understood and made totally transparent.
Borrowing against future streams of charging revenues
will allow much-needed improvements in public
transport to be brought forward. So long as road pricing
is introduced as part of a package of other measures, then
it should be possible to persuade drivers that paying is
better than being stuck in ever-worsening jams. All that
is needed is a commodity that often seems as scarce as
space on the roadsópolitical leadership.

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