Our last blog post (hey, check it out) ended with a lame attempt at a teaser.
After 900-ish words arguing that new roads almost never reduce traffic, we promised that in the next part, we’d tell you what does help.
So here we are. What we didn’t mention is that this solution is about as popular as a foot-and-mouth outbreak.
In a word, or rather two, it’s road pricing.
This time, we’ll take a look at:
- what road pricing is
- why it reduces congestion
- why it’s so unpopular
- why it’s absolutely inevitable
What is road pricing?
Road pricing is tricky to define, but it’s essentially where a direct fee is levied on using roads, with the cost varying with the amount or type of use.
Examples include:
- toll roads or toll bridges
- charges that depend on the type of vehicle (e.g. ULEZ)
- charges that increase with the distance a vehicle travels
In the UK we currently have very few toll roads, increasing numbers of ULEZ-type schemes (e.g. big urban centres), and no distance-related charges – unless you count mileage-based options from insurers.
How does road pricing help congestion?
We saw last time that traffic congestion is all about how drivers balance their costs and benefits for using the car.
As a recap, most people have a sort of time budget they will allocate to journeys.
Let’s say your time budget for travelling into a city is 120 minutes a month, and the one road there takes you 30 minutes. To fit your budget, you’re prepared to take about four city trips a month. Then a new road opens that slashes your journey time to 15 minutes. Great – now you can make eight trips a month instead! But as everybody else is doing the same thing, before long the traffic builds back up, and now everyone is back to four trips a month. The city has gained more visitors, but no one’s getting there any faster.
In the real world, this ‘induced demand’ happens time and time again, and for one reason: there’s no extra cost associated with the new road. It’s a freebie – so why wouldn’t you, or anyone else, take it? Of course, costs are still there in the taxes you pay for road construction – but those aren’t obvious when you’re in the car and rolling!
Beefing up public transport can help reduce road traffic, but this alone doesn’t cut it. After decades of making cars king of the road, it’s no wonder that it’s hard to prise people back out of them.
Planners have found that the most effective way of reducing traffic is to stop making road use ‘free’. For example, a huge analysis of 545 European cities showed that road-pricing schemes reduced that pesky induced demand, especially alongside better public transport. Closer to home, London now has about 50,000 fewer cars on the road per day since the introduction of the expanded ULEZ.
Why road pricing is unpopular
The problem with road pricing schemes is that people hate them.
From Hong Kong to London, Milan to Stockholm, road pricing schemes have been met with criticism, opposition, protests and sometimes vandalism.
To be clear, we’re not implying that everyone opposes road pricing, or even that a majority do. Certainly there are plenty of cases where after grumbling for a while, road users have come round to the benefits. But it’s true to say that road-pricing schemes are rarely introduced without divisiveness and heated argument, and masses of drivers (and others) continue to detest them.
There are plenty of reasons for this. Perhaps the most solid is that road pricing usually hits poorer people the hardest.
Commuting is a good example. Often, no one but the wealthy can afford to live in urban centres, so everyone else has to commute in for work. Poorly paid workers end up paying a bigger percentage of their income in tolls. Meanwhile, public transport alternatives can be pricey, inconvenient, or unreliable. In ULEZ schemes, poorer people also tend to drive older, more polluting cars that attract greater charges.
Often, business owners are vocal in opposing road pricing, arguing that their livelihood – and that of their employees – depend on car transport.
For some, road pricing feels like an elite grinding down ‘ordinary people’, and they want to fight back
Road-pricing supporters point out that it’s poorer people who suffer the most from pollution-related health issues, but those concerns can seem distant compared to an immediate drain on the wallet.
Regardless, road pricing IS coming
If you feel that road pricing is the devil’s work, we’ve got bad news. Road pricing is coming to the UK. This isn’t in any party’s manifesto, but as far as we can see, it’s pretty much inevitable. It will come in the third form we mentioned above: charges based on how far you drive.
It’s nothing to do with traffic and everything to do with electrification. The government currently raises £28 billion a year from fuel duty – a colossal source of revenue. This will all disappear in the coming years as the world switches over to electric vehicles. Whatever the UK government does about its own EV targets won’t reverse that global trend.
When that revenue goes, the government can’t replace it by taxing the electricity used to power our cars. That’s because if you charge at home – and most people will – there’s no way of telling if you’re using electricity to run your car or your fridge. The only way to raise revenue will be to charge a tax by the miles you drive. That’s also the most direct equivalent to how fuel duty works at the moment.
Just how the government monitors your mileage is another question. We’re thinking compulsory black boxes tracking you, which all sounds a bit 1984 (the book, not the year) – brrr!
No matter how you pay for your road, we’ll be here
Let’s end on a (hopefully) high note. If you’re in South Wales, and you need your car serviced, repaired or MOTed, we’ll be here to give you a main dealer level of care at affordable prices. To book your vehicle in, or for any enquiries, get in touch. We specialise in VW Group marques like Volkswagen, Skoda, SEAT and Audi, but we’ve got shedloads of experience with other cars too.
Happy driving and we’ll see you in a fortnight.