Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Hyperlocal Road Pricing - a Viable Option?
Our area has a long history of road pricing. In 1739 the Stamford Hill Green Lanes Turnpike Trust started taking tolls on Green Lanes at its intersection with Tottenham Lane (subsequently renamed Turnpike Lane).
Turnpike Lane Toll Booth, late 19th Century (disused and soon to be demolished)
In 1789, the Manor House Turnpike was established.
Manor House Toll Booth 1869 (three years before the end of the turnpike system)
Both gates lasted until the turnpike system was swept away in 1872. Road charging wasn't seen again in the UK till the early years of the 21st century. First came Durham's congestion charging scheme in 2002, closely followed by London's in 2003.
Eighteenth century thinking saw the case for road charging as being revenue raising to pay for the maintenance of roads. Twenty-first century policy wonks made the case by way of a traffic management rationale.
Around the world today various road pricing schemes are being planned, trialled and implemented. Unless they apply to bridges and tunnels, all schemes tend to be city-wide or road-system specific. When road pricing began in the eighteenth century however, it was much more local.
I have begun to wonder if there's a case for hyperlocal road pricing where only certain roads or neighbourhoods are involved. Pricing could be variable, where different rates could be charged to different groups with some groups being charged nothing at all.
Some vehicle owners may see such a scheme as the thin end of the wedge. Others might see it as a cheap to administer form of traffic management and revenue raising (With the technology in place for supermarkets to road-price their car parks, the technology barrier is gone).
Is it an idea whose time has come or one that should just leave us cold?
Additional Info:
- RAC report (attached)
- DFT report (attached)
- roadpricing.blogspot.co.uk
- EU Website info on roads & transport
Tags for Forum Posts: congestion charge, road pricing, traffic
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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M6 bypass 2003.
The problem with schemes like these is the tariffs are always set at a level that people are just about prepared to pay so they have little effect and are just revenue-raising exercises. If the Government really wanted to stop people smoking they would set the tax so a packet cost £30.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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You think? Would you say that applies to the London scheme?
For me the issue is that as well as modifying behaviour, road pricing schemes are in effect regressive taxes. So it's a finely balanced issue.
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Yes, but if we are worried about vehicle usage and traffic management, the balance should come down firmly on the side of deterrence, not revenue raising.
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I wonder if that depends to some extent on what the revenue is used for. If it's earmarked for sustainable transport initiatives it might create a virtuous policy circle.
For the record, the London scheme certainly changed my driving behaviour.
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Permalink Reply by Dan on
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I don't think the destination of the revenue will change the decisions of drivers to turn left or continue. Similar work has been done in tax collection (your tax pays for x) to improve compliance, which did not have a large effect.
I do personally agree with the concept though. The evidence is becoming clear:
a) There aren't many destinations within wightman for vehicles beyond residents. so it's not a journey which needs to be made.
b) It is thus a significant cut through for a large amount of traffic. People are doing it to save time.
c) The negative effects of traffic on wightman road are a significant cost to local people.
d) Congestion charging schemes can have a positive effect on traffic.
I think such a proposal is an excellent idea. It would be extremely innovative in it's local nature. Is this something the mayor would support?
On the connection with smoking - I agree with John - taxes on smoking are not in place to stop smoking. But they are to ensure that the costs of smoking are not placed upon other members of society who do not smoke. The same principle can be applied here in an innovative local sense.
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Permalink Reply by Finsbury Park Ranger on
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They don't increase smoking tax more because it would push people to buy black market fags even more and be counter productive.
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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I've tried out some automatic number plate recognition software myself and it works (CPU intensive) but it's bloody hard to get the photograph. Once that works (although our cars will be GPS/Wifi tagged by our insurance companies soon) you can easily do this as the DVLA will (for a charge) let you look up owner details. I'm not sure a council that uses Word documents for form filling and scanned printouts to generate PDFs would be interested in this but they're certainly the people I think should be - it's just not our bag.
Traffic used to bother me a lot and now it doesn't. I think our traffic problems and pollution from internal combustion engines have a limited time, especially in cities like London, to go.
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Would the council need to be proficient? If there were a will couldn't it readily be subcontracted?
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The survey that they did seemed remarkably confident that at least 75% of the Wightman Rd traffic was non-local so I suspect that they were doing more than counting and with some DVLA/Debit Card tech we could be reaching into people's bank accounts to correct the notion that they travel for free on our roads.
Owning a car has both a tangible and an intangible financial cost. Once you have bought it you begin incurring the intangible cost of depreciation. Let's say that ten years ago you bought a car for £20,000 and it's now worth £4,000. So we have £16,000 of intangible cost. If you did 80,000 miles at 30p per mile running costs (the AA link does not include insurance), that's £2,400 per year. Including the intangible cost in a simple manner of just spreading it out evenly over the ten years sees your car ownership per mile in London costs go to 50p a mile, £5,000 a year. The trouble is that I see a lot of older cars that only cost £2,000 so have very little intangible cost to the owner and once they have bought them, an eight mile round trip in London is only about £3 all up (as opposed to £4 for the £20K car).
The regressive nature of any road pricing tax would be obvious as a £2,000 car will pay, as a percentage of their costs, much more than a £20,000 car. e.g. pricing it at 20p a mile for an 8 mile journey would be more than 50% for the £2,000 car and 40% for the more expensive one. Pricing it differently will just encourage people to buy inefficient old bangers.
Something has to be done though because that maths makes it cheaper to drive than to catch the bus.
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Permalink Reply by pamish on
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Those costings are only the ones immediately due to the driver/owner.
They don't include the infrastructure costs, and in particular the costs to the NHS from pollution. I don't have a handy calculator but it probably doubles it.
More Freedom Passes, if/when the public transport system can bear it, would work. I drove 609 miles last year. Don't tell me the per-mile cost, thanks.
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Absolutely - The cost of fuel is a market failure. The price of harm is not included in cost.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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I know the Durham City scheme and it's a pretty straightforward one. The historic centre of Durham is built on a gooseneck bend in the Wear and there's only one road that carries traffic onto what is essentially an island, Sadler Street. Also, apart from students, academic and cathedral clergy and staff, very few people actually live in the city itself.
At first they had rising bollards but then changed to number plate recognition. As there is only one way in and out of the city it was simple to install and enforce (a bit like The Gardens)
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