A round-up of journal papers and other research published in December and January using CLS study data.
The first Street Talk of 2018 put the issue of pay-per-mile road pricing to a panel of experts. Nicholas Sanderson sums up the choices city leaders will need to make in order to roll out road pricing.
London’s Congestion Charge turns 15 this year. Its immediate impact was of fewer vehicles, less congestion, better air quality and reduced carbon emissions. It kick started the rapid rise of cycling that London has witnessed over the last decade, and in parallel, it enabled a major increase and improvement in London’s big red buses. At the time it was opposed by the main contendors for Ken Livingstone’s first run at the Mayoralty and the media. Looking back it’s hard to imagine London without it.
15 years on and New York City is re-considering its own version, while Stockholm, Gothenburg and Milan already have theirs. In Singapore, meanwhile, a congestion scheme of some sort has been around since the mid-1970s, and they have had more dynamic road pricing since 1998. Both Vancouver and Portland are now considering something similar.
Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, is considering a pay-per-mile charge for lorries and Sadiq Khan’s draft Transport Strategy considers developing a new form of pay per mile road pricing – one that takes into account distance as well as weight, carbon and air pollutant emissions. This form of road pricing is advocated for by a cross-party committee of London politicians as well as the Centre for London’s independent commission.
It seems that cities around the world are grappling with how to manage traffic, whether for pollution reasons or to better deal with congestion. Last month’s Street Talks event sought to discuss the issue with a broad panel of experts and experience. Here are five takeaway thoughts facing a pay-per-mile road pricing scheme that stood out from that discussion.
The first, obvious point of distinction comes with major ramifications – the choice of objectives for any scheme. If you want to tackle congestion and encourage sustainable alternatives for travel, you won’t have a reliable revenue stream. A scheme designed as a reliable revenue stream from motoring would be very different to one that seeks to reduce motoring. What might be attractive to the Chancellor is unattractive to Britain’s Mayors and council leaders grappling with congestion and air pollution.
The Wolfson Prize brief, which our speaker Gergely Raccuja’s ‘Miles Better’ proposal responded to, was full of sustainable revenue generation. But as Joe Irvin set out early on, our problem is one of rising traffic volumes, air pollution and declining physical activity. Road pricing needs to encourage and support the shift to alternatives to the car, including public transport, walking and cycling as the Congestion Charge did before.
The ‘Miles Better’ proposal could provide a technological and institutional platform on which local road pricing schemes could be built around. It shows that, politics aside, a scheme is technically possible, if ministers decided what it was for.
What was particularly clear from across the panel was that a charge aimed at deterring car use wouldn’t work, nor be politically acceptable, without viable alternatives for everyday travel. Central London benefits from excellent public transport relative to the rest of London and other parts of the UK. Here, the congestion charge saw a major increase and improvements in buses. The number of people entering the zone by bus very quickly increased by 37%. Years of preparation and investment gave Ken Livingstone the confidence to go ahead. Any other politician will face this choice: at what point (and in which places) are the alternatives to car use good enough to start deterring car use through pricing, or is the charge the schock treatment needed to kick us out of habit and improve alternatives?
It is clear to us that any road pricing should ring-fence money raised and reinvest it in public transport, walking and cycling improvements. This is the typical model of ‘stick and carrot’, providing better alternative choices while nudging people towards them with the pricing system. Nottingham’s Workplace Parking Levy, for instance, has played a part in the shift to public transport use in the city. The income from it has raised around 5% of the funds needed for its £570 million tram extension.
However, the money raised through road pricing won’t be enough on its own, nor will it be totally reliable due to the reasons set out earlier. Substantial and ring-fenced funding must be identified and allocated to the development and improvement of walking and cycling infrastructure along with public transport if road pricing is to succeed. Road pricing alone shouldn’t be seen as a funding panacea for cities nor a critical revenue stream. With physical inactivity estimated to place direct costs to the NHS of £1.06 billion a year; £6.5 billion a year assocaited with lost productivity through absence from work, education and premature death; and on top of that around £10 billion a year as a result of poor air quality, congestion and traffic collisions, supporting a shift in travel behaviour through is clearly worth much much more in the long term.
Protecting against a revenue focussed charge could be a job for any enabling legislation. It is already illegal for Local Authorities to factor parking fines into decisions and plans on budgets. Likewise, the legislation that allowed for congestion charging and workplace parking levies specifies that funding must go back into sustainable transport. Promoters will need to be wary of the myth of the ‘cash cow’.
Fairness needs to underpin any scheme. The five negative health impacts of motor-traffic - physical inactivty, collisions, air pollution, noise and severance - all have greatest impact deprived and vulnerable people in our society [PDF]. Those on low incomes, elderly or young, are more likely to suffer the negative impacts of roads and traffic while also being those who benefit least from the mobility it offers.
The lower a persons’ income, the less they travel, the less likely they are to own a car. In this sense road pricing is already progressive. Those who earn more, own more cars and drive them more often. Those who earn less use public transport, walk and cycle more, and suffer the negative impacts of traffic more. As part of a strategy to improve non-car options, road pricing is equitable. All other forms of public transport charge per use and a premium at busy times, why should roads be any different? But this assumes public transport is geographically equal, abundant and accessible (back to point 2).
There is then the question of defining and addressing what to do with ‘essential vehicles’. First, there are those who depend on a car for their mobility because of impairment, and second, the vehicles that bring goods and other things in and out of our cities for which alternatives aren’t readily available. These two issues are why pricing is perhaps fairer than an outright ban. It allows exemptions to be made through modified or existing benefits and welfare provisions, and for the freight sector, a well regulated market would decide who has access by vehicle and encourage the most efficient use of them. Meanwhile non-motorised travel (a) avoids the charge and (b) benefits from concomitant investment and reduced traffic, both of which serve to tip the balance for the great majority of personal travel.
In cities across the world, road pricing is back on the table. Elected leaders will have to make some difficult decisions over what the scheme is for, whether they have confidence in their sustainable transport options, where the money will go and how to structure to system for greatest impact. We know that pricing isn’t a silver bullet, but a very powerful means to manage demand from cars, vans and lorries while shifting the space on our streets to favour walking, cycling and public transport.
Our Street Talk demonstrated how the discussion has moved on in London. Polling suggests Londoners are broadly supportive with two-thirds thinking a road pricing scheme would be fairer than the existing congestion charge. We are already on a path to more comprehensive charging with the T-Charge and Ultra Low Emissions Zone. And across political parties, our repreentatives recognise the flaws with the congestion charge and want something even more effective. New York, Vancouver, Portland are considering charges, while British cities moot their own Clean Air Zones.
Our Street Talk panellists helped to set out the choices ahead. The ‘Miles Better’ proposal showed what is technically possible already. The question is what is politically possible.
Mara Acoma is a Photographic Artist living and working on the East Coast of Durham. Her work explores ideas of ‘What if?’
A hot chocolate is a great reward for cycling in the snow!
Mara Acoma is a Photographic Artist living and working on the East Coast of Durham. Her work explores ideas of 'What if?’ inviting the viewer to examine their own ideas, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She was awarded an MA in Photography with Distinction by the University of Sunderland in 2016. In this blog Mara shares with us why she has decided to give up her car, and what factors helped her make her decision.
There are so many aspects of our modern society that are all wrapped up in our love affair with the internal combustion engine. As an artist, I make work about issues and subjects that interest me, but this has got to be the biggest set of issues I’ve tried to tackle to date.
When I decided to hang up the car keys and start walking and cycling instead of driving, my decision was usually met with shock, disbelief and even fear. That “deer in the headlights” type of fear in peoples eyes at the thought of living without a car. The only people who didn’t think I was insane were cyclists, they instead were full of encouragement. So why was my idea causing such disbelief? It was that look in peoples eyes more than anything convinced me I needed to do this project. Find out for myself exactly how my life would change without my own personal combustion engine waiting outside my home to take me where ever I wanted to go.
“ My body is adapting faster than I thought it would. ”
I started on the 1st of December 2017, I considered waiting but that was when my road tax ran out and I was worried if I gave myself too long to think about things I’d lose my nerve. Besides if you can survive winter without a car then surely summer would be a doddle.
So what are the issues I want to investigate, the big-picture aspects of the project? Well, there is 'Transport Poverty’, something many people will never have even heard of. 'Fuel Poverty’ regularly makes the national news headlines and is defined as when a household needs to spend 10% or more of their income on fuel to keep warm. Now take that definition and apply it to your transport needs? What sort of percentage are you spending on travel? Personally, I was shocked how much of my hard earned cash was going on simply moving me from one place to another. The bottom line is cars cost a lot to run as opposed to walking and cycling. There is fascinating research being done in this area (some by Sustrans) exploring the links between transport poverty, social mobility, employment and the ability to access health care.
Then there is the health and wellbeing aspect. I’ve lost count of the number of friends who’ve told me they were fitter, but practically all of them will hop into their car to travel 1-mile to the shops for a pint of milk. We all know our NHS service is under stress but how much of an impact would we as a nation make if everyone made a few less short journeys a week in their cars and cycled instead? My own experience has seen me go from someone who thought they’d have a heart attack after riding 2-miles to being able to ride 30-miles in a matter of months and I bet I’m “Little Miss Average” in this regard.
I’m now coming up to two months into the project and what have I learned? Well, it’s been a roller coaster emotionally, December was easier than I imagined and January harder. My body is adapting faster than I thought it would but I have developed a bit of an obsession with hand knitted socks to keep my feet warm. We have a woefully spotted cycling infrastructure with regards to things like bicycle racks in shopping centres, but using my bike for the household shopping trips is saving me money. I’m making fewer impulse purchases and we’ve reduced our food waste as a result.
Cycling instead of driving hasn’t so much limited my options but changed them. I don’t 'just pop’ places anymore but consider things more carefully - The weather app on my phone is also seeing much more use as the weather has become more relevant to me now that I’m no longer cocooned in a metal box.
I feel in some small way that sitting on my bike has helped me to break free from the rat race. It’s true Britain has a long way to go to become the cycling-friendly place we cyclists would love to see it. However, the most surprising thing I’ve discovered so far is that I’m not missing my car the way I thought I would, and I’ve got a smile on my face a lot more often.
