BRITAIN:On the same planet?

But let’s be positive first up. A chapter by Alan Day emeritus prof at the London School of Economics makes the general case for road pricing with some eloquence: “The case for road pricing as a fundamental element in a fair and rational system of transport coordination is built on elementary principles of micro-economics which themselves rest on firm intellectual foundations. Since the overwhelming evidence of the failures of socialist bureaucratic economic coordination has been obvious to anyone with eyes to see, these principles have been more or less universally accepted... It provides a flexible and subtle information (and incentive - TRnl) system... the rational reactions of individuals to this information interact in order to produce a social optimum in which the efficient use of resources is maximized... Since long before environmentalism was ever heard of economists have argued that social costs... include the adverse impacts on others of pollution and other externalities... For many decades economists have argued that the polluter should pay.”

Day is a pragmatist: “Perhaps there is a better Utopian mountain across the other side of some misty and uncharted valley, reachable only by revolutionary change. One of the lessons of history is that the course of revolutionary change is unpredictable. Many environmentalists, like earlier socialists are utopians with all the confidence implicit in their belief that they can forecast far into the future and their willingness to pay a large price now for benefits in the relatively remote future. The approach of the piecemeal improver (is) that almost all longterm forecasts prove badly wrong, and that the logic of compound interest indicates that it is worth paying only a very small price today, even for the sake of a large and certain benefit in the distant future.”

He is scathing about the inherent inability of transport planners to come to grips with complex and changing reality and says much of what they do is “the blind application of guesswork and prejudice.”

Only a flexible price system can take the complex variety of people’s personal travel needs and situations and make maximum use of any major urban transport system. While in the short-term the role of pricing is to allocate existing capacity more efficiently, just as important is its medium and longterm role in guiding decisions on adding to, or subtracting from, capacity.

“It is quite indefensible to argue as many do that road pricing should simply be used to ration existing road space. Road pricing should be used both as an allocative device and as a measure of whether or not to add to or subtract from the existing road space. It can and should be used as an investment criterion... If road users are prepared to pay a price for the use of roads that is greater than the costs of providing additional road space (including all costs, externalities etc) then the additional road space should be built, and as in any other economic activity, the charge for the use of the new facility should be sufficient to finance its cost.” (p5)

He disposes of the notion of infinite demand for roadspace, saying this will appear to be the case only where frustrated demand has grown to large proportions. And there is nothing wrong with a growth of motoring so long as motorists are paying their way.

Only Disabled Have Rights in UK

Gabriel Roth, not identified as a resident of this side of the Atlantic, makes the case for commercializing roads so that government owned road authorities would have to finance themselves from revenues disbursed according to the traffic they attract from monies paid to them by road funds. Investor owned road companies would be free to nibble at the edges of the business by building competitive roads since they would be entitled to the same per trip fees from the road funds as the govt road corporations. So far this is all flat-rate shadow tolling.

He then suggests congestion pricing could be superimposed on the shadow toll system, but acknowledges that this could be misused if controlled by a government committed to reducing motoring (veh-mi traveled). The British government acknowledges the sovereignty of the physically disabled. Such special people as the handicapped deserve to be allowed to drive more, according to the canons of British Labor. But the rest of the Britons, those less favored under Tonyblairism, the ablebodied untermensch, less deserving of consumer freedoms, apparently are to be badgered out of their cars by enviro-nanny talk, taxes and tolls. So Roth ends on a pessimistic note saying that in Britain’s political context pricing could become “an instrument of tyranny enabling governments to increase their powers by extracting (super-profits) from the use of monopolized infrastructure.”

Why then trust government with control over road corporations and road funds in the first place? It might be better to simply let the existing state road bureaucracies molder away, all the while promoting real independent self-financing toll corporations to gradually take their place in an opportunistic manner where there is an agreed need for better roads, and where the prospective tolls will finance them.

A recent British govt paper proposes to give local governments the right to levy congestion road charges and also to tax work-parking spaces – all with the object of reducing car use and to finance alternatives to the car. This is the very anti-car tyranny that Roth fears. An editorial here by John Hibbs acknowledges this: “If government and the media persist in the notion that road pricing is about deterrence (of motoring)... we will fail to achieve the increase in economic efficiency which is the primary justification for such a radical reform.”

Insular ignorance

What is appalling about this set of articles is the level of ignorance displayed throughout about road pricing technology – electronic tolling as implemented already for about 10 million motorists around the world in about 100 places. David Bayliss described as director of planning at London Regional Transport refers to “the fact that there are not off the shelf systems readily available.” Maybe the salesmen from Amtech, Saab Combitech, Mark IV, NEC, Siemens, CS Route and a dozen other companies need to call on Bayliss. Or he needs to consult a copy of one of the excellent trade journals such as TRANSPORT TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL or ITS INTERNATIONAL published there in London for the world markets in such technology. One can imagine a planner in Rangoon Burma or in Cambodia saying something that stupid, but this guy is paid a wage by taxpayers in London!

Another contributor Paul Truelove a Birmingham university engineer claims that for electronic tags to be useful they would have to be universal (p18) without explaining why a mix of identification and billing or collection technologies cannot do a passable job. Has he ever seen modern tolling?

He then writes: “It is significant that the small number of successfully trialed or implemented electronic road tolling projects have been in isolated sites.” He mentions Singapore, Hong Kong and Bergen Norway.

Is New York City isolated, the Italian autostrade system, southern California, the French autoroutes, the Kansas turnpike, Sydney’s M2, Houston, the toll roads of Spain, or Toronto? Is Oklahoma an island? Closer to this cloistered academic engineer Dublin Ireland now has electronic tolling. Of course it’s an island and a bit isolated I suppose. Then there is electronic tolling on the M25 in the Dartford Tunnel in London but of course that’s on the other side of London from Birmingham so perhaps it’s not in his local paper, though they plan it on his Birmingham North Relief Road.

Truelove also asserts: “No one has yet demonstrated a road-pricing scheme under which a limited number of drivers who pay a fee are admitted to congestion-free bus-only routes.”

Really? Sounds very much like QuickRide that Loyd Smith of Houston Metro is running on the Katy in Houston. And don’t I-15 in San Diego and 91X demonstrate such buy-in to a reserved lane? How many conference papers do Sullivan, Kawada, Stockwell and Smith have to give before the news gets through to this ‘expert’ in Birmingham?

Another engineering prof Peter Hills from Newcastle is at the other extreme of techno-optimism saying that what he calls a “simple read/write” transponder with an LED display can be manufactured for 5 pounds, that is $8. They’ll have the world market sewn up if they can do that. It sounds like the kind of Mark IV tag they have in Chicago and pay $40 for. Hill’s $8 doesn’t quite buy you the simplest read-only no-display tag from Amtech the world’s largest manufacturer. And that’s all at the practical 905 to 920 MHz equipment in use here in north America, which battens off the economies of scale of vast cellular and cordless phone sales. European prices are usually double US prices because they have chosen the more expensive 5.8GHz frequency band to build their equipment to.

One can apparently be published in a serious British journal while being blithely ignorant of about 99% of the substance of the subject on which you pronounce, so long as you write from a university or a government chair. (Contact IEA 44 171 799 3745 iea@iea.org.uk)