Congestion and road pricing links

It's been an interesting couple of days in the wacky world of congestion and road pricing. First, the House of Commons Transport Committee tried to identify some ways to address congestion without resorting to road pricing and came up with ... not very much really, just a lot of well-meaning but essentially small-bore stuff about trying to make motorists behave better or think smarter, and the usual griping about roadworks. None of these are going to have a very big impact on congestion, as the committee probably knows. So this report is actually another piece of evidence in support of road pricing, if only by omission.

Secondly, a much less noticed but more rigorous analysis of the issue was provided by the IFS in its Mirrlees Review of Taxation, which looked at a range of issues including 'Taxes on Motoring'. They make the very important point that while the existing fuel tax regime acts as a sort of indirect tax on road use, increasing fuel efficiency has made it less and less effective in this role, which means that our only national brake on congestion gets weaker over time:

However it is done, we do not underestimate the political difficulties of introducing road pricing nationally. But in addition to the long-standing case for such a move, we need urgently to wake up to the fact that, if the UK and other countries are to meet their targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, petrol and diesel use by motor vehicles is likely to have to fall and eventually end as alternative technologies are introduced. This will leave the UK with no tax at all on the very high congestion externalities created by motorists. So, if we all end up driving electric cars, it seems that we shall have no choice but to charge for road use. It will be much easier to introduce such charges while there is a quid pro quo to offer in terms of reduced fuel taxes ... Of all the challenges raised in this volume, this seems to us one that is simply inescapable. It may be another ten years before change becomes urgent, but urgent it will become and the sooner serious advances are made to move the basis of charging to one based on congestion the better.
(emphasis added)

Lastly, Dave Hill of the Guardian makes the case for the crucial role of road pricing in particular and transport policy in general in fostering urban prosperity and quality of life here.

Speak up

Matt Yglesias recommends that people who want to see progressive policy changes should (a) badger their elected representatives about it and (b) relentlessly tell their friends and family about how progressive policies would improve their lives, even if it basically involves annoying them.

If you are in a car with me and we’re in a rush hour traffic jam, you are damn well going to listen to me talk about congestion pricing. This generally doesn’t work in Washington for national politics, but whatever it is you do I’m sure you interact with lots of “apolitical” or moderately conservative people who remark now and again about things in their life to which politics is relevant. Point this out to them. Tell them who the bad guys are. Recommend some good blogs. Your friend Bob probably thinks he doesn’t care about monetary policy, but does care about the state of the labor market. Explain it to him ... These two things are, I think, the most underrated props of conservative dominance in the United States. Conservatives write and call congress at a much higher rate than progressives, and more-or-less ordinary people hear conservative political messages from preachers and business executives all the time.

That last bit is spot on. If progressives believe that many people's lives would be improved by more redistribution, better public services or (say) widespread congestion pricing, it's odd that many of them are fairly coy about saying so outright and often prefer to keep the discussion in the realm of policy wonkishness.

Perhaps it is because conservative-friendly ideas come pre-legitimised by religion, wealth or power (not to mention a supportive media), while progressive policies often (but not always) involve considerations of the common good trumping immediate self-interest. Maybe that's a harder sell, but that's just all the more reason to put the effort into selling it.

I agree with Matt that road pricing / congestion is a case in point. The example of London shows that it would lead to improvements in quality of life and free up space to provide for buses, pedestrians and cyclists. The benefits would also overwhelmingly flow from the better off to the less well off. Yet hardly anyone seems willing to publicly advocate it. I guess they may be scarred by the experience of the lost Manchester referendum, but then that's a reason to be out there organising support and building coalitions so that the next time around there is a stronger strategy with a stronger chance of winning. In other words, don't be shy about your convictions, because you can be damn sure the other side won't be.

The war for the streets

Aaron Naparstek's article from a few months ago on the 'war for the streets' in 1920s America is well worth a read:

University of Virginia professor Peter Norton details the early history of the car and the city in his wonky but fascinating book, Fighting Traffic. He describes the “blood, grief and anger in the American city” and the “violent revolution in the streets” of New York and other U.S. cities as automobile owners bullied their way on to city streets, literally, leaving a trail of mangled children’s bodies in their wake.

In the 1920s, motor vehicle crashes killed more than 200,000 Americans, a staggering number considering how many fewer cars actually existed in those days. These days, 35,000-or-so Americans are killed in car wrecks annually. Most of the dead are drivers and passengers on highways and in rural places. In the 1920s, most of the dead were kids living in cities. In the first four years after the Armistice of World War I, more Americans were killed in car wrecks than had died in battle in France...

Cars were a nuisance and intruder on city streets and drivers were seen as “tyrants that deprived others of their freedom.” City streets were places where kids played, pushcart vendors sold goods and a wide variety of vehicles and traffic moved and intermingled mostly at human-scale speeds. New Yorkers and city people all across America “saw the car not just as a menace to life and limb, but also as an aggressor upon their time-honored rights to city streets.”

It was a war which the car won hands down:

Yet by 1930, the backlash was largely over. The automobile had secured its place on city streets and motordom had won. Rather than conforming to the demands of the American city, the city began its decades-long process of conforming itself to the needs of the automobile...

Changing a city’s infrastructure takes decades. Changing social mores can happen much faster. “Before the city could be physically reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists unquestionably belonged,” Norton writes. By 1930, that social reconstruction was largely complete. New Yorkers had mostly accepted the automobile in their midst, despite the fact that 10 years earlier, many considered it to be nothing more than street-clogging, exhaust-spewing, horn-honking, child-killer owned and operated by a small number of wealthy elites.

As Naparstek says, those statistics on road casualties in the 1920s are shocking, in comparison to much smaller casualty figures today which we quite rightly regard as unacceptable. I was interested in what the equivalent figures might be for London, so I put together the chart below from a range of sources, mostly annual statistical abstracts published by the London County Council or its successor the GLC. The chart shows the trend in annual traffic fatalities in London between 1901 and 2010, with the red line (up to 1966) referring to the Metropolitan Police District area and the blue line (1966 onwards) the current Greater London area, both including the City of London.

What the chart shows is that annual traffic fatalities in London rose rapidly from the start of the century, with an interruption at the time of the first world war, and peaked in the early 1930s. In 1933 1,458 people were killed on London's roads. That's an average of four people every day. The general trend has been downwards ever since, apart from another large trough during the second world war and the subsequent rationing period. In 2010 'only' 126 people were killed on London's roads, less than a tenth of the 1933 figure. There were many more non-fatal casualties too, with a total number of casualties (deaths plus injuries) of 59,080 in 1933 and 60,958 in 1934, more than twice as much as in 2010*.

Overall, the 1920s and 30s saw a level of carnage on the roads that would be difficult to imagine today. I don't know much about the metropolitan politics of this period but my understanding is that the London authorities responded in much the same way as those in America: by trying to get pedestrians and cyclists out of the way of motor traffic, and by making the roads 'safer' for cars to drive through, mostly by widening and straightening them. Individuals, for their own part, sought to protect themselves: people who could afford cars bought them, and overall car ownership grew very quickly. At the same time, businesses were switching en masse to motorised transport.

These were all understandable reactions, and over the long run we did see road deaths come down (partly for a host of other reasons, of course), but not without huge costs. By making life harder for pedestrians and cyclists and easier for drivers, the authorities reinforced the individual incentive to protect oneself in one's own steel box, and helped make the car completely dominant, which brought problems of congestion, pollution (which kills plenty of people itself, none of whom are shown in that chart), noise and an ever-present danger which sucked the life out of so many city streets.

It's worthwhile considering an alternative history, one in which the city authorities tried to tackle the problem of road deaths at its source rather than seeking to make roads safer for cars. What if they had imposed a toll or charge on motor vehicles equivalent to the costs they imposed on everyone else, or banned them altogether from parts of the city? Traffic levels would have been much lower, pedestrians and cyclists would have felt safer, and there would have been much less need to redesign streets to accommodate motor vehicles. Car ownership would presumably still have grown, but not to the point where it dominated everything else. We might have ended up in a good equilibrium were people felt free to choose less damaging forms of transport, rather than the one we're in now.

It's easy to say this in hindsight, obviously. The political will and perhaps the technology were not in place to do this in the early 20th century. But that doesn't mean we have to live with the consequences of the wrong decision all these years later. London has already gone some distance towards reducing the dominance of motor vehicles in the city centre, but we can and should go further.

* Total casualties, as distinct from fatalities, didn't actually peak until 1967. I'm planning a post for londontransportdata that will go into all this in more detail.

Taxi cabs: Deregulate and tax

Matt Yglesias says people who want to see less car ownership, less space used for parking and less driving overall "should support relaxing regulatory curbs on the number of taxis allowed to operate in a given place". I think I'd like to see this happen in London, with one small condition: they pay a per-kilometer tax to cover their external costs of congestion, pollution, noise and death/injury through collisions. Currently we don't tax these external costs so they create a lot of problems for everyone else. Removing one type of economic distortion without removing the other will just lead to more of these problems.

We need to measure subjective cycle safety

Following the recent tragic death of a cyclist in on Cavendish Road in Clapham, a local resident who witnessed the crash asked TfL what they could do to make the road safer, especially in light of a report back in 2008 which recommended that the junction in question needed to be redesigned to make it safer.

TfL said no. Here's their reasoning, posted by LCC on one of their comment threads:

...We found that in this section of Cavendish Road there had been 11 collisions in the last three years (up to 30 April 2011; collision data is supplied to us by the Police, and this is the most recent data available).  None of these collisions involved cyclists and two resulted in serious injury.  This particular section carries a large volume of traffic, more so in fact than the majority of other A roads in the borough.  Given the volume of traffic and when compared to other, similar roads there have been a relative low number of collisions on this section of Cavendish Road.  As I said, TfL is data led in its approach to progressing schemes on the Transport for London Road Network.  We could not progress a safety scheme at a location at which there had been fewer collisions than at other areas.  For this reason, we have no plans to progress a scheme at this section.  I appreciate that this is a sensitive issue, and would be happy to discuss further...

TfL appear to be saying that they will not consider trying to make a road safer for cyclists until a sufficient number of them are killed or injured on it. The obvious problem with this is that people tend to avoid cycling on a road if it seems unsafe or threatening, but by TfL's logic a road with no cyclists must be a road that is perfectly safe to cycle on.

I think this calls for cycle campaigners to try and produce some better data on how safe and friendly cyclists or would-be cyclists perceive different streets to be. We need objective data on subjective perceptions, in other words. This kind of thing is relatively easily available at large scales from sample surveys (see this recent one from Manchester for example), but what we're really interested in is identifying which individual streets and junctions are the most cycle friendly, and which need the most work to make them safe and inviting.

A while back I proposed something along these lines on the GB Cycling Embassy forums, with the idea being to get people to rate images taken from Google Streetview, but I haven't developed it any further, mainly because I don't have any IT skills.

But now some smart people from MIT have come along and produced something very similar called Place Pulse, which posts two random Streetview images from a handful of cities in the US and Europe and asks people which looks safer. Screenshot below:

They then analyse the results to see which places look safer. It's striking how the places rated as safest are all in Austria and mostly very pedestrian friendly while the least safe are all car-dominated streetscapes in the US.

Place Pulse is focused on 'safety' in the widest sense, but it shows that you could do something similar for cycle safety, and then use the results to understand what people associate with safe or unsafe cycling environments. And then maybe we could get TfL to understand that they should be proactively trying to build streets that invite cycling.