Continue reading »]]> Letter to the Guardian published 14 February, 2007
Published version at http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2012301,00.html
Sir

When Labour came to power 10 years ago John Prescott proclaimed “I will have failed if in five years time there are not many more people using public transport and far fewer journeys by car. It’s a tall order but I urge you to hold me to it”.

He has failed. Since that proclamation the nation’s motor vehicle population has increased by 7.5 million. At parking meter distances (264 cars per mile parked nose to tail) these extra vehicles could be accommodated in a new car park stretching from London to Edinburgh 85 lanes wide. The owners of these extra vehicles expect not just somewhere to park at home but also the ends of their journeys, and roads on which to get there. Huge amounts of space are required to meet these expectations.

Congestion pricing is not the answer. It is symptom treatment that will make the problem worse. It will simply disperse the problem into those parts of the country currently least congested. It will encourage yet more sprawl and low-density, car-dependent land use patterns, hostile to pedestrians and cyclists and unserviceable by public transport.

The on-street car park in older urban areas has been full for some time. Overwhelmingly the extra cars added to the nation’s car population each year must find parking spaces out of town. Their new owners are choosing to live in areas where they have no choice but to depend on their cars.

You note (The Price of Pricing, 12 February) that motoring is now cheaper than it was 25 years ago. To discourage sprawl and increasing dependence on the car motoring costs should be increased most in the areas where the growth is fastest – the opposite of the congestion charging currently proposed.

An extended version of the argument can be found in Darling, meet the 800 pound gorilla!  and Hypermobility: too much of a good thing

Continue reading »]]> On 12 September 2006 the Department for Transport initiated an experiment on the M42 in which, in periods of congestion, drivers would be allowed to use the hard shoulder. Media coverage of the experiment focused on safety problems: in the event of breakdowns or accidents emergency services would take longer to get to the scene.

There was virtually no discussion of the policy incoherence that under-pinned the experiment. The Department for Transport has two policies for dealing with congestion. The oldest is “predict and provide”, i.e. the provision of more road capacity to accommodate forecast traffic. Traffic growth has rendered the prediction part of this policy redundant. The Department now struggles to provide capacity to carry existing levels of traffic. The M42 trial is a cheap application of this policy. The second, newer, policy is congestion charging.

Both policies are doomed to failure because neither addresses the underlying problem of which congestion is merely a symptom: the continued rapid growth of the nation’s car population. Providing more road capacity at the hottest congestion hot-spots merely releases suppressed demand and increases the temperature of surrounding warm-spots. And so long as growth continues throughout the system, trying to price traffic out of the hot-spots will also spread the problem.

For more on this theme download Darling, meet the 800 pound gorilla!