Still, there’s a flaw in these schemes. After initial sharp reductions in congestion, both Stockholm and London saw some erosion of these gains in later years: though many fewer vehicles were entering the city centre, as before, the reduction in traffic within the cordon was much less. Why? Much as if the city had added capacity, drivers responded to the easier traffic conditions by . . . driving more. So perhaps we need something still more ambitious—something like Singapore’s “electronic road pricing” scheme.
With Singapore’s long experience of London-style cordon tolls—their own scheme, implemented in 1975, was the world’s first—the city state took things a step further in 1998. Not only are tolls collected at entry points, but also along major arterial roads. Every vehicle on these roads must carry a card on its dashboard, much like a prepaid phone card, capable of being read by Highway 407-style sensors: the value of the toll is deducted from the card automatically, with higher rates applying as traffic volumes increase. Drivers therefore have an incentive to choose less heavily travelled roads, but without a backfill of traffic flooding in to take their place: prices see to that.
Indeed, the system works so well, the question arises: why not toll . . . every road? Obviously this couldn’t be done with toll booths, or even gantries. But with satellite tracking technology, familiar to anyone who uses a GPS, it should be possible to apply the Singapore model comprehensively. Tolls would no longer be discreet events, but more like your phone bill: the price you paid to use the road system, much as you pay to use the telephone network. The tolls would vary dynamically, according to the time of day, the distance travelled, the type of vehicle and so on. Satellites, moreover, could be used to update drivers on the prices of different roads as they came up; route-planning software could be used to predict the costs of alternative routes.
If that sounds far-fetched, you should know that the British government under Tony Blair came within a hair’s breadth of implementing just such a scheme. In a white paper published in July 2004, it proposed a rate schedule ranging from a few pence, for weekend drives in the country, to more than $1.50 a mile, for rush-hour traffic on the ring road around London. It was calculated the plan could reduce the amount of time lost in traffic jams by nearly 50 per cent. The aim, Blair declared in 2006, was to introduce “a national road-user charging scheme . . . within the next decade.”
Alas, the plan was later abandoned by Gordon Brown in the face of popular opposition. But the idea is far from dead. The Netherlands was all set to introduce a similar scheme this year, before a member party in its governing coalition got cold feet. Oregon has experimented with it. Trucks in Austria and Germany already pay tolls this way. Indeed, some of its strongest proponents are to be found here in Canada. Toronto-based Skymeter Corp. is actively marketing the technology, while policy gadfly Lawrence Solomon, founder of the free-market environmental group Energy Probe (disclosure: I am an unpaid director of Energy Probe), holds several international patents on it. The Toronto City Summit Alliance treated the idea seriously in its recent report. A demonstration project in a major Canadian city might be just the thing to launch the technology worldwide.
There are obvious practical obstacles to implementing such a plan, though none that seem insurmountable. Privacy is a common objection, but similar concerns do not seem to have prevented millions of people from entrusting the records of their most intimate conversations to the phone company: it is surely possible to be as discreet with the usage of their car. There are simple technological fixes, for example, converting data on a car’s location to the corresponding price before it ever leaves the transponder. Those for whom it remained an issue could prepay, again on the cellphone model.
The problem of enforcement, likewise, is more apparent than real. You would be required to install a transponder as a condition of licence, just as you are obliged to have a working odometer, tail lights etc. Spot checks would be easy enough to conduct.
WHAT ABOUT the more fundamental objections to road pricing? Two in particular come to mind. The first, that tolls would be unfair to the poor, is perhaps the more easily discarded. The very poor, of course, would not pay the tolls, as they do not typically have cars to drive. The rest could be compensated in cash, similar to the GST tax credits, rather than giving everyone, rich or poor, a free ride. And of course, the poor benefit as much as anyone from clearer streets and faster travel times, not least as transit users.
To the second, that tolls would become a cash cow for governments, the simple answer is that any revenues from tolls can and should be used to lower taxes: perhaps even the gas tax. To be persuasive, the offset would have to be guaranteed, immediate, and 100 per cent: voters are rightly skeptical of any such promised trade-offs.
Indeed, it may even be necessary to go so far as a plan put forward recently by the Social Market Foundation, a British think tank. It proposed putting ownership of the road system in a public trust, at arm’s length from the government. At the end of the year, all toll revenues would be distributed to every member of the public—the trust’s shareholders. Depending on how much you drove, you might even make a profit on the deal.
Which means discarding one of the most common arguments made for tolls: that the revenues could be used to finance public transit. For starters, this is unnecessary: the very act of tolling roads would, by itself, make public transit more competitive, since the per-person cost of the toll would be much less for buses than for cars (and none at all for subways and surface rail). Moreover, as the economist Robin Lindsey explains in a study for the C. D. Howe Institute, “transit vehicles speed up when tolls are imposed, because there are fewer cars on the road. This attracts more travellers to transit. In response, transit operators improve service by adding routes and increasing frequency. Due to economies of scale in transit operations, the cost per passenger falls, perhaps allowing the operator to lower fares. Ridership increases further, and so on.”
If getting more people to use transit is your aim, moreover, subsidies are the last thing you should want. The biggest factor in people’s decision whether to use transit is not the fares, but rather the speed, comfort and convenience relative to other options: that is, the passenger experience. And the surest means of forcing transit operators to pay more attention to the passenger experience is if their livelihoods depend on it. The greater the share of revenues paid for by passengers themselves, the more operators are likely to be lying awake at night thinking up ways to put bums in the seats; subsidies simply insulate them from that concern.
The nub of the argument, whether we are talking about cars, or buses, or tennis rackets, is this: people make better decisions when they know what things cost. Right now the true cost of using the roads is hidden, leading people to drive more and in different ways than they would if they were better informed.
Even a modest road-pricing scheme would be a start: traffic jams wouldn’t be entirely a thing of the past, but they would be a lot less common. And the more comprehensive the plan, the greater the payoff: shorter travel times. Lower fuel costs. Fewer accidents. Less noise and pollution. Higher productivity. Road pricing would make us richer, healthier, saner. If London, Stockholm and other cities can do it, why can’t we? Why, other than because it would be new, and because we would be paying for something we were used to getting for free.
Only it isn’t free now. It’s hideously expensive. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, and as any commuter can tell you, there sure ain’t no such thing as a free road.
