Blair wimps out on tolls

British premier Tony Blair has wimped out on motorway tolls, committing his country to an increasingly second-rate and deteriorating transport system. Blair has vetoed a plan for motorway tolls, proposed by his transport secretary John Prescott and the UK Treasury, as the only viable revenue stream for maintaining and modernizing the country’s major highways. The UK has only a small dedicated revenue stream for financing roads and other transport projects, which depend mainly on annual appropriations by the national and local governments. Given the long time that roads now take to get built because of environmental permitting requirements, politicians have little incentive to start the process of road improvement. They’ll be out of office before any of the benefits are seen by their constituents, but risk being around while the pain of controversy and construction rages.

So in the UK road improvement lags way behind need. Moreover in the absence of road pricing there is no mechanism in place to ration scarce space in congested areas. The Blair government has floundered from one roads policy to another. It proposed a system of parking taxes on the argument that this would induce greater use of rail and other public transport. Surveys found that most businesses planned to simply absorb the tax as part of the cost of doing business rather than pass it on to parkers, so it has become clear it will do little to affect mode choice. The government has now backed away from that. A scheme to allow local governments to impose cordon charges on vehicles entering central business areas has passed but this depends on local initiatives.

The strongest champion of such cordon charging is Ken Livingstone, a rebel who departed Blair’s Labor party and got himself elected Mayor of London against Blair’s choice. Tony May, a transport specialist at Leeds University has done modeling which shows the cordon pricing schemes are far less efficient a means of managing traffic than a variable vehicle-miles traveled charge in urban areas. They seem likely to run into strong opposition from interests within the cordon and to generate new traffic problems around the cordon boundary. Moreover the revenues under current plans will be used almost exclusively for public transport improvements and will run into heavy motorist opposition as a result. This has already manifested itself causing the Blair administration to say it is up to local governments to decide whether or not to implement cordon tolls.

The Blair government’s dithering on the issue of tolling in the UK has also been excused by claims the technology of electronic tolling is not yet well enough developed. But technology is always imperfect and if you don’t deploy what works usefully now, what chance is there of improving it? Talk to Caltrans, Brits!

Gabriel Roth, a Washington DC area transport consultant who follows the UK scene has said that policies discussed in Britain are so hostile to motorists – especially proposals to use tolls to finance public transport – that they seem doomed to political failure.