Traffic: Into reverse

Taking a toll: though London’s traffic-charging scheme has cut congestion by 14 per cent in the west-central area of the city, the area is being removed from the zone

Most weekdays, slow-moving traffic forms a barricade between the two halves of King’s Road, the main thoroughfare through the well-heeled London district of Chelsea. For about 1km from Sloane Square, at the eastern end, taxis, buses and four-wheel-drive cars sit bumper to bumper, engines running, inching towards their destination.

Nonetheless, on Thursday 20 sq km of Chelsea and other parts of west-central London will be removed from the capital’s congestion-charging zone – the area drivers must pay to enter during weekday working hours – reducing it to its original 22 sq km. Even Transport for London, the body responsible for the scheme, acknowledges this will worsen jams. Vehicle numbers are expected to rise by 15 to 20 per cent. Congestion – measured by the extra time a journey takes compared with clear road conditions – is poised to worsen by as much as 18 per cent. Emissions of harmful gases will go up sharply.

The end of charging in west-central London is one of many signs that sentiment across the industrialised world has turned against efforts to substitute, or supplement, traditional fuel-based taxes on motoring with direct charges.

As recently as 2006, many policymakers across Europe and North America were looking closely at systems that charged for driving into the busiest areas or according to the distance driven. Those that tracked cars using satellite, microwave or number plate-recognising cameras were expected to transform road conditions by persuading motorists to switch to less busy times or routes, or to use another mode of transport altogether.

The question today is whether the factors that first made road-charging popular – worsening congestion and a gradual drop-off in fuel duty revenues – will eventually force politicians to reverse their recent retreat from it.

“In the last five years, the emphasis has shifted away from congestion and towards carbon,” says Professor David Begg, a former chairman of the UK’s Commission for Integrated Transport who supports direct charges. International backing surged after London’s charge was introduced in 2003, he recalls, but referendum defeats for planned versions in Edinburgh in 2005 and Manchester in 2008 have fed into growing political scepticism about their saleability to voters.

But Prof Begg believes environmental issues and excess traffic must be tackled in tandem. “Dealing with carbon is all very well,” he says. “But it still leaves you with a congestion problem.”

Many of the subsidies that reduce cars’ carbon emissions – by encouraging the purchase of electric cars and the scrapping of older, dirtier vehicles in favour of cleaner ones – reduce the average tax received for each mile driven because they reduce fuel consumption. The effect is a fall in the money available to maintain or build roads combined with reduced fiscal penalties for car use.

The outlook was far sunnier for road-charging’s proponents even in 2006. When Tony Blair, then UK prime minister, appointed Douglas Alexander transport secretary that year, he sent him an open letter identifying as his top priority advancing the national debate on road-user charging.

Click to enlarge

The initial enthusiasm over London’s charge had encouraged Stockholm to undertake a successful trial, he wrote, with others planned in the UK, the US and elsewhere. Germany, Switzerland and Austria had introduced charging for trucks; the Netherlands and Denmark were developing national schemes. Trials were under way in several US states.

“I would like you to identify the key steps for the successful introduction of road-user charging within the next decade,” the prime minister wrote confidently.

Most transport economists still favour Mr Blair’s approach. Taxes on road fuel are an increasingly poor means of controlling congestion. A driver at night on a deserted country road pays the same in fuel tax for every litre of fuel burnt as a peak-time counterpart in an overcrowded city centre.

Charlene Rohr of the European arm of the Rand Corporation, the US think-tank, says a system of variable direct charges would cut costs for many drivers – and improve driving conditions for all. “Farmers in rural England would be better off,” Ms Rohr says. “Even those that are paying more would be better off in some ways because there would be reduced congestion.”

In the US, state governments remain interested in road charging, concerned at the reduction in their budgets caused by the improved efficiency of cars and below-inflation fuel tax increases. The government of Oregon, one of many to fund its highway budget almost wholly from fuel tax, says in 1970 it received the equivalent in 2010 terms of 3.28 cents in fuel tax per mile driven in the state. Today it receives only 1.13 cents.

The result is weaker bridges and potholed rural roads. James Whitty, who manages the part of Oregon’s transport department responsible for finding fresh funding mechanisms, says the state’s highway budget will become “unsustainable” without a new means of charging for road use.

. . .

Yet the public remains largely deaf to the experts’ enthusiasm. In west-central London, the £8 daily charge, introduced in the area in February 2007, reduced traffic entering the zone during charging hours by 14 per cent, preventing the formation of still longer tailbacks on the King’s Road. However, 62 per cent of residents responding to a consultation in 2008 wanted it scrapped.

Mr Blair’s government lost enthusiasm for a national scheme after 1.7m people signed an internet petition calling for its abandonment in early 2007. The Dutch government abandoned its own plans this year after a partner in the coalition government grew apprehensive.

Mr Whitty says he was surprised that Oregon’s motorists rejected plans for a per-mile charge, tested in a 2006 trial . The scheme, which depended on global positioning system satellite location markers to determine a vehicle’s whereabouts, was designed to protect motorists’ privacy. It kept no record of where the car had been. “It was simply the mistrust in government ... not the technology,” he says. “I think that’s probably the case not only here but around the world.”

Road-charging’s most ardent supporters say politicians need simply to argue their case more forcibly. Gabriel Roth, a British transport economist based in the US, points out that Singapore has charged for use of congested roads since 1975. Mr Roth, who served on the committee that in 1964 first mooted road-pricing for the UK, designed the island-state’s original system.

“The Singaporean government seems to be interested in making everybody richer and more efficient,” he says. “It’s just different attitudes with different governments.”

Nevertheless Lord Adonis, the former British transport secretary and one of few politicians willing to discuss the subject publicly, insists falling fuel duty receipts are a long-term issue not worth tackling now. “I certainly don’t think it’s even a debate which any serious politician would be wise to open up,” he says.

Road-charging advocates detect signs, however, that the logic behind the idea is  keeping it on at least some political agendas. Jeffrey Zupan of the Regional Plan Association, which studies urban planning in the north-eastern US, points out that New York state is funding a major study on distance-based road charges – even though its senate in 2008 threw out plans for a New York City congestion charge. Mr Whitty says that the more he explains road-charging to politicians, the more their fears are dispelled.

According to Jack Short of the International Transport Forum, an arm of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that develops transport policy, stretched public budgets mean major road-building will need in future to be funded by the private sector. That is likely to lead to a proliferation of privately funded roads charging tolls, like those in parts of the US and developing world and the UK’s M6 Toll.

Truck-charging systems are a further exception to the rule that charging policies are being abandoned. The road haulage lobbies of countries with high fuel taxes – such as the UK – support direct charging because foreign trucks can avoid the levies by filling up where fuel is cheaper. France and even the UK’s coalition government – which has entirely rejected a general national charging scheme – are considering systems for trucks.

Mr Zupan and others accept that small programmes, studies and arguments won are mere straws in the wind compared with the national road-charging mainsail that promised to steer whole nations’ transport networks. But they argue that, ultimately, they show just as surely which way the policy wind is blowing.

“It’s a really tough sell for politicians and I understand that,” Mr Zupan says. “But my feeling is that they’re going to come back around to it when all the other financial options are exhausted.”