The Evolution of the Cooperative Vehicle

Cooperative Vehicle Highway Systems focus on sensors, telemetrics, intelligent driver override, roadside computation, telecommunications, emergency technologies and so on. The stress is on technological solutions that address a problem with a large social and human component—e.g., human safety, congestion, efficiency, and reliable automobility.

CVHS’ goals form a virtuous circle: reduce accident counts and severity and improve the performance and efficiency of existing transportation infrastructure while reducing fuel use, emissions, and congestion. These are a lot of wins.

In general, when thinking about CVHS, we see two components: vehicle and roadside infrastructure. Also key are intelligent communications between car and roadside, many-to-many pair-wise communications between proximate cars, and of course communication among all of these and the cloud. But there is another critical and elusive component—the driver. I’ll return to this.

CVHS is highly related to the Connected Vehicle, and sometimes the distinction get blurred in discussion. I see them as two adjacent phases on a continuum as we equip vehicles, roadways, and communication networks for the Connected Age of Automobility already underway. The Cooperative Vehicle is focused on safety and driver assistance including driver override, while the Connected Vehicle is focused more on driver information and trip assistance, including infotainment and payment services. But, a portion of the enabling fabric can be shared.

A key distinction is that many Cooperative functions involve intrusive control—generally braking and steering—when the driver is perhaps distracted or not responding appropriately. Meanwhile, some Connected functions have the potential to contribute to the distraction problem that is one of the motivators for the Cooperative functions in the first place.

All of  this makes the human a mystery component. Will the net benefit make us safer? Will automation make our species’ driving skills atrophy? Will anyone be able to parallel park in 30 years?

A well-reported phenomena called risk compensation tells us that drivers tend to invest a perceived increment in safety by driving a bit faster or a bit more aggressively. Humans seem to have a risk budget they are eager to spend. The problem is more than 50% of the people in accidents are victims. If you count all immediate family members to people actually in the cars the percentage of innocents is much higher.

Surely, if one begins to trust that their vehicle can handle breaking and steering, the use of infotainment systems and gadgets (Connected or not) will be perceived as safer. And that may not be a problem in most cases—we hope. But how good does Cooperative technology have to be before Connected technology will not make us less safe?

There are liability reasons ensuring that Cooperative technology will likely never by installed as an aftermarket upgrade, unless by the original manufacturer. And there will clearly be resistance to letting the car “take control” from a driver. Could aftermarket warning systems that beep rather than brake or whistle rather than steer, be the way to erode that resistance? Could aftermarket Connected Vehicle platforms be the Trojan Horse to get fledgling Cooperative Vehicle functionality past first base? I think so.

We also know from experience that mandatory safety equipment requires user acceptance, which in turn implies slow introduction and consumer-led market penetration prior to mandate. This may be the best reason that aftermarket Connected Vehicle technology that has at least some Cooperative-like functions will the best accelerator to Cooperative Vehicle evolution.

One Hour Free Parking Could be Worth Millions to Toronto

Toronto needs a few things related to transportation. It needs more mass transit—either subway or light rail—I won’t choose sides. Toronto appears to need more parking judging by the fact that there is seldom a spot available when you want one. Or maybe it needs a different kind of parking management, because there are usually enough parking spaces in most circumstances, but they are priced to have some areas 100% full and cars waiting to take a spot and nearby areas nearly empty when they could be making money for the city.


And Toronto needs more money.

Now before you set this aside in disgust at the idea of more parking in a world that is already flooded with cars, many already parked, and the rest circling around the block looking for a spot, consider that there are not enough parking spaces in some areas because they are priced wrong and there are empty spots nearby, because they are signed wrong. I assert that if we could address this, there would suddenly be plenty of parking without creating any new parking spots or lots or garages—and Toronto could take a big bite out of its deficit.

My first target is One Hour Free Parking. There is far more of it than we use, and it could be sold if only we could manage it.

Not long ago, I decided to park my car near the Greenwood subway station and take the train downtown to a meeting. Since I might be longer than 3 hours, I decided not to risk using the pay-and-display meters on the main street, Danforth, so I drove to the next street north. One-hour parking. And the next one, too. So I went up one more and finally ended up parking about 0.5 km away from the station. Because I had cruised back and forth looking for free parking I had essentially driven an extra 1.5 km while passing well over a hundred, empty, one-hour-free spaces. I figured I needed to park about three hours and did not wish to risk a $30 citation. But, I got my free spot!

I would have been happy to pay for parking by the hour, one or two streets off of the main drag, as long as I would not be ticketed if I returned a bit later than planned. If it was a bit cheaper, as well, I’d be happier yet.

“So what”, you might think. “Go find a GreenP lot along the Danforth to use.” I could have done that, but the two nearby lots were installed just after this. (And think of the expense to the city of keeping precious corner parking lots on main thoroughfares which could be sold and developed into commercial or residential property that generated tax revenue while all of the empty one hour free parking could used to store parked (and paying!) vehicles do not. The City is paying a huge and double cost to provide undersubscribed One Hour Free Parking. Millions every year, I’d say.

One hour free parking has two other problems. The first is that it is very expensive to enforce. A parking officer has to pass by twice to confirm that someone is overstaying, that means that since one hour free parking is not much in demand, enforcement revenue is sporadic and will produce little or no net income for the city compared to the enforcement income available from meter violations from the pay-and-display machines on the heavily used main drag. The second problem is, because one-hour free parking is used on streets where there is somewhat less demand so that the city can hardly afford to use costly pay-and-display machines there, since revenue per machine would be very low.

There is another solution and that is to manage on street parking in these marginal areas where enforcement is expensive and where most people need more than one hour anyway with wireless in-car parking meters that hold all the pricing rules and payment instructions internally (to keep your location 100% private). These automatically detect parking in payable areas and generate a parking bill for monthly payment. This means Toronto could allow participating motorists to pay a little less (but not free) to park a block or two away from the major streets that use pay-and-display machines. Since these spots are away from the commercial retail storefronts, cars could park there longer then the current time limit, although they would continue to pay for the duration of their stay. Toronto could even grandfather one hour free parking for the first year or two, since many people will feel it reasonable that someone willing to walk a block or two be able to park free for a few minutes to run an errand. I disagree, but that hardly matters. Such a system with its pricing rules buried inside like a smartphone app is remarkably flexible.

And some of the money could be used for mass transit, and some of it could be used for local improvement of the streets in those residential areas.

But the most important part is that having a place to park is something motorists want. In fact, the four most important things for motorists, as shown in parking studies, are, in order: (1) finding a parking place easily, (2) not getting a ticket, (3) having a convenient way to pay, and (4) cost. The scheme I describe satisfies all four, and would make motorists very happy.  Hence this scheme, in Mayor Ford’s parlance, helps relieve the “war on cars”—all while helping with Toronto’s deficit.

What’s important about this is that it is neither pro- nor anti-car and that is because I am neither pro- nor anti-car. What I am observing is that the parking spaces that we do have are simply not well deployed they are underpriced in some places causing them to be over demanded. And right beside those places are unusable spots that could be slightly less in price so the net of it is that drivers could be happier, the city could have more money, and cars reduce circling around so that emissions are reduced. Best of all, this scheme requires no change in current rules—it can be entirely voluntary. Any driver not interested in parking this way can simply park as they do now. Refuseniks would be better off, because there would now be more spaces in the pay-and-display areas, while their bolder brethren are better off saving a buck by parking a block or two away. It is also the case that it is much easier to spot check a vehicle using this technology then it is to use the “tire marking” methods needed to enforce one hour free parking. This is a win win win win win scheme. It can’t get much better than that.

Or can it?

It turns out that the same technology can be used anywhere—curbside, lot, or garage. And that means that we can introduce graduated parking on street. Graduated parking means that instead of getting a ticket for staying past a time limit, the parking fee simply escalates slightly. This encourages turnover, gives the city money for every minute over the limit, reduces the need for enforcement and its attendant costs, and makes the entire experience of parking much more pleasant.

And if you do not like cars, look at it this way: if others are going to use cars anyway it makes sense to charge properly for parking, to reduce the number of cars that are circling around looking for parking, and to reduce the cost of enforcement. I estimate that the current city parking enforcement team in any city can manage 2 to 4 times more parking spots with this new technology. That means that we can have much more sensible parking policies without any layoffs and without new hires. Altogether I estimate that over a five-to seven year period it is possible to put two to four times the number of parking spots under this kind of “pay-as-you-park” management (any form of parking can be managed this way) and that this can be managed with the same staff complement. That would mean that we could at least quadruple net income from parking to our city. Since much of that comes from efficiencies, the burden on drivers is very small compared to the convenience and timesaving in finding a parking spot. Win win win win win.

The war on cars, 1970

Eric Fischer comments on this ad for Motorists United, from Car Life, July, 1970: “It's…[a]lso interesting that their anxieties were all about regulation of the vehicles themselves rather than allocation of street space or availability of parking.”

Rifling through the online comments on most newspaper articles today, nearly 42 years later, about congestion pricing, nothing has changed. “...anxieties are all about the evil government tracking monster rather than allocation of street space or availability of parking.” Sanity be damned. F-R-E-E-D-O-M!

Does Peak Car mean Peak Road?

In a recent online discussion group about congestion I posted this question:

In the face of US reports of plateauing VMT and the increase in the average age of our automobile fleet, it would seem that the demand for new lane miles would be easing. Does anyone know if this is happening? Or is the lag in demand too long to test this effect, yet? Or is the pent up demand too great for an effect to be visible. Where can I go for such data?

Another participant, Todd Litman of the Victoria Transportation Institute, provided an insightful reply that is worth sharing (with permission):

That's an interesting question, Bern. There is a growing discussion among transport planners, particularly those involved in strategic planning, about the implications of peaking VMT. During the last century, vehicle ownership and travel grew steadily so it made sense to invest significant resources to expanding roads and parking supply; there was little doubt that additional capacity would be needed, it was simply a question of how soon. The main indicator used to evaluate transport system performance, roadway level-of- service, only reflects inadequate roadway supply. Transport models that extrapolated past trends into the future were used to predict that roadways would experience "gridlock" without future expansion. 

But per capita vehicle travel peaked in most developed countries about the year 2000, and total U.S. VMT peaked about 2007. This results from structural trends including aging population, rising fuel prices, improvements to alternative modes, increased urbanization, increasing health and environmental concerns, and changing consumer preferences. The research cited below indicates that in developed countries, motor vehicle travel is unlikely to grow much overall in the future; there may be modest increases in VMT in areas with significant population or industrial growth but most areas will see traffic volumes hold steady or decline in the future. 

This has important implications for transport policy and planning. It indicates that traffic and parking congestion will be less important problems to address than in the past, while demand for alternatives (walking, cycling, public transit, telework and delivery services) will increase. Congestion is a problem in many urban areas, but it is unlikely to get much worse, and it is just one of many transport problems, so congestion reduction is no longer the dominant transport planning objectives. In response to the combination of these changing demands, aging roadway infrastructure and declining fuel tax revenues, transport agencies are placing more emphasis on system maintenance, operations and modal diversity, and less on system expansion.

For more information see:

Phil Goodwin (2011), "Peak Car: Evidence Indicates That Private Car Use May Have Peaked And Be On The Decline," Urban Intelligence Network (www.rudi.net/node/22123 ).

Todd Litman (2005), “Changing Travel Demand: Implications for Transport Planning,” ITE Journal, Vol. 76, No. 9, September, pp. 27-33; at www.vtpi.org/future.pdf.

Todd Litman (2012), “Optimal Transport Policy For An Uncertain Future” at http://www.planetizen.com/node/54215
David Metz (2010), “Saturation of Demand for Daily Travel,” Transport Reviews, Vol. 30, Is. 5, pp. 659 – 674; summary at www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news- articles/1006/10060306 and www.eutransportghg2050.eu/cms/assets/Metz- Brussels-2-10.pdf.

Adam Millard-Ball and Lee Schipper (2010), “Are We Reaching Peak Travel? Trends in Passenger Transport in Eight Industrialized Countries,” Transport Reviews, Vol. 30 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2010.518291).

Steven E. Polzin, Xuehao Chu and Nancy McGuckin (2011), "Exploring Changing Travel Trends, presented at Using National Household Travel Survey Data for Transportation Decision Making," Transportation Research Board; at http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/conferences/2011/NHTS1/Polzin2.pdf.

Clark Williams-Derry (2011), "Dude, Where Are My Cars?", Sightline Institute (www.sightline.org); at http://daily.sightline.org/blog_series/dude-where-are- my-cars.

Maybe it is good that neither the US nor Canada can fix the fuel tax

I write here a lot about the need to shift from fuel-tax to a pay-as-you go road-use fees. A lot of people write about this.  Recently Jack Opiola wrote some more in ITSI (“Evidence buildingfor distance-based charging”). 

Opiola’s point is that we could increase acceptability by giving drivers 2 or 3 choices of methods to pay for road use rather than encourage hostility by mandating a single technology, namely GPS. He goes one further by saying: “the market place would supply the necessary technology and data collection services, certified to ensure the system works consistently. …the Government could contract the tax collection function to private companies, with competition driving down administrative costs. Government would provide oversight and certification of private sector providers to ensure fairness.”

I agree completely.

On the way to the explanation, he points out a few things worth thinking through. I cherry-pick a few:

“Last month the (US) federal government announced a sizeable increase in the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards for new vehicles, bumping the required average of 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016 to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. …this policy will have a devastating impact on highway funding if US Congress does not take corresponding action to identify revenue not based on fuel consumption.”

“…some cars on our streets already contain much of the technology to meet the new CAFE standards. Fuel efficiencies of many hybrid electric vehicles are approaching 50 miles per gallon and steadily raising the fleet averages. Now entering the marketplace are fully electric and plug-in style hybrids - Nissan's LEAF and Chevrolet's Volt, among others. Every major automobile manufacturer is preparing at least one electric, plug-in hybrid, or advanced hybrid model for market entry in the next two to three years.”

“These vehicles, capable of nearing or exceeding the calculated equivalent of 100 miles per gallon, will generate little fuel tax. It is estimated the entire fleet will need about 40% of the fuel it currently consumes, reducing tax revenue by about two-thirds.”

Increasing the fuel tax “would create an ever-widening inequity between owners of highly fuel efficient vehicles and those [that] pay a far heavier burden by continuing to operate conventional cars.”

“Alternative funding sources must be found to maintain the health of highway systems… Policymakers have considered replacements for the fuel tax, such as sales taxes, registration fee increases, personal or real property taxes, income tax, value-added tax, tolling high capacity highways, taxes on oil company profits and others.”

“But each shifts the burden of paying for the roads from one type of user to another or to non-users. In almost all of these cases, the proposed alternatives are less equitable than the current system.”

“The fuel tax is based on use, but its consumption linked formula is woefully out of date and not correctable.”

“Since two congressional commissions on transportation funding endorsed VMT as the most viable alternative to the fuel tax in 2008 and 2009, the US has done little to advance the discussions.”

The net of this is that in the next few years the structure of road-use funding via fuel taxation will remain unchanged and this will boost sales of alternative (non-fossil) vehicles, whereas shifting from fuel-tax to road-use fees now would dampen those sales. This is one case where government inability to act may have a partially-positive outcome. Although, Oregon might prove an exception.

Perhaps we should shelve the discussions about VMT tax and Mileage-based User Fees for a few more years. Technology will soon drain so much revenue from our highways and roads that a future government will have little choice, anyway.

Spying on your life or saving your life?

Over in AutoSavant you can enjoy a dose of scare mongering about a device to meter driver behavior for PAYD insurance.  Any device that monitors, views, films, captures, measures, listens, collects, or sniffs data about anything humans do seems to be fodder for phobic journalism and paranoid commenters. PAYD insurance indeed has privacy issues.  But they are addressable.

The real reason for PAYD insurance is to distribute risk more fairly for drivers and more manageably for insurance companies (right now your zip code is used (among other things) to help assess your risk profile). In addition to tentatively threatening privacy and increasing affordability for more than 50% of drivers, PAYD insurance also enhances safety, and reduces vehicle miles traveled (VMT).

Unfortunately, instead of discussing privacy, cost, safety and VMT in a balanced fashion (which I would say should be about 5%, 25%, 50% and 20% respectively, this journalist weighed these four matters at 90%, 10%, 0% and 0%. This is to do a huge disservice to his readers.

When I read the article there were 39 comments. 54% were against the PAYD device (stoked by the writers privacy fears), 28% were for the device for reasons of fairness, safety or cost savings and 18% were neutral or incoherent. Statistically speaking, these 39 commenters are somewhat smarter than the journalist (usually only extreme opinions show up in these open forums).

~~~

Technology has been extending average life spans for many hundreds of years. Medical advances (e.g., near-mandatory vaccination programs) come to mind. Not long ago, seat belts were considered an invasion of privacy, now a majority of us put them on without thinking about it. Tonight I was stopped in a mandatory alcohol check-point. I was asked if had anything to drink this night. Was that an unfair imposition on me? (I drink a glass of wine once a month and had none this night.) I have been twice sniffed by narcotics detection dogs while in airports.  Another privacy invasion?

Driving safer saves lives. About half of the victims of road accidents were driving comparatively safely. Progressive's program may save opt-ins a couple hundred dollars, and it also saves lives. Anyone with a family member killed by another driver would applaud this form of insurance; many with a family member who has killed someone in an accident might also consider this a good idea. 15 years ago I had a brother-in-law who took his own life a few weeks after killing someone in an auto accident.

Compare how many Americans have been entrapped in a legal matter unrelated to road use with evidence provided by tolling data or automotive insurance data vs how many innocent Americans are disabled or dead because of automobile accidents.

A similar product to Progressive’s, available in Australia, (betterdriver dot com dot au) promises to save teen lives. Here the party watching is the teen’s parents. Big Daddy if not Big Brother. Fewer complaints, it seems, because they are our kids.

The key issue is NOT the metering of driving behaviour, it is the USE of that data. There must be strong, and strongly upheld, legislation that this data only be used for the purpose of fair insurance pricing and safety. The readers who comment: “you are being monitored” may be right, but it is not the monitoring that is harmful, it is the potential for abuse. We need to address the potential for abuse, rather than reject a powerful tool for automotive safely.

Fuel Tax vs Property Tax

Why do we to pay two taxes for roads?

One of the most common objections to VMT charging or mileage-based user fees is “I already pay (for roads) with fuel taxes”. While I have heard or read this many hundreds of times, I have never heard anyone complain, “I already pay (for roads) with property taxes.”

It is interesting that we are so very sensitive to (or aware of?) of fuel tax, but not so much to property tax. And why do we pay two taxes for our roads, anyway?

A 2009 article from Access Magazine explains this neatly.

Early in the 20th century most US “…cities had the technical and financial means to widen their streets, install traffic signals, and carry out other operational fixes. But they lacked the means to shoehorn extensive freeway systems into dense urban areas. One problem was that the tax instruments available to local governments were not appropriate for the task. Local governments had the authority to levy taxes and special assessments on property and businesses, but not, for example, on fuel. The property tax is a sensible mechanism for financing local streets and roads, because these streets link individual land parcels to the world and help give them value. It is thus logical for property owners to help pay for local street construction. Freeways, however, affect the value of property across the entire metropolitan area, not just of nearby parcels. This makes it hard to justify special assessments on freeway-adjacent properties, since the majority of a freeway’s benefits accrue to travelers and landowners over much larger areas. (Indeed, being too close to a freeway can lower land values, particularly for residential property.) … A potential solution to these problems emerged in the 1920s with the development of the gas tax. As a way to finance freeways, gas taxes had much to recommend them: they placed the tax burden on users of the system, they were relatively easy to administer and collect, and they were robust. Property tax revenues nationwide plummeted 72 percent during the Depression years of 1930 to 1939, but fuel consumption and its associated tax revenues proved surprisingly resilient. Except for a small dip at the beginning of the Depression, fuel consumption rose every year until World War II (emphasis mine).

So a fuel tax was indeed a valuable innovation 100 years ago. It would remain a valuable innovation if the purchasing power of fuel tax were consistent with the needs of building and maintaining roads. But it is not. As fuel economy improves, as the purchasing power of the road building and maintenance dollar shrinks, and as we refuse to increase the fuel tax, its efficacy continues to wane. And that is only half the problem with the fuel tax. It also does not respond to congestion.

And while the property tax is also insensitive to congestion as a pricing signal, its correlation with road use is even more tenuous than is the fuel tax. This makes it less fair than fuel tax—since a young renter who contributes to her landlord's property tax payment and who does not use a car overpays for road use.

So we have two taxes that are ineffective in managing demand, one of which we cannot adjust and the other of which we seem to have minimal awareness of. While mileage-based user fees could solve both problems given the right policy design, we seem particularly attached to a status quo that is unable to give us the roads we need, and that increases congestion.

Our attachment to a tax structure that is keeping in place a very serious problem for both inter-urban and intra-urban mobility is critically bankrupt and a huge barrier to solving congestion and its attendant ills.

Collaborative Telemetrics

If Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers are right in their recent book “What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption”, we can expect a rise in peer-to-peer car sharing.  P2P car sharing turns any owner of an automobile into a single-car car-rental company, with reservation services provided online. Right now one of the US operators, RelayRides out of Cambridge Mass, installs technology to lock and unlock the vehicle using a near field communication card that the renter-member keeps in her purse meaning that key-exchange does not require owner attention. That’s a start.

Traditional car-share operations such as ZipCar, lower automobile ownership, reduce demand for parking space, reduce automotive miles traveled, and likely reduce traffic congestion in peak times. P2P car sharing offers all these things—and more. VMT supply can be increased dramatically without investing in more vehicles, car owners can have their neighbors make their car payments for them, it can make a greater variety of vehicle sizes and types available to a car share renter, and the vehicle storage depot problem mostly goes away.

While traditional car sharing has economic incentives for people who only need occasional access to a vehicle, P2P carsharing has economic incentives for car owners. This is disruptive, making it something to watch. 

Wikipedia lists 13 P2P car share operators world-wide—with the 1^st launch in Germany in 2001. Half of these launched or are launching in 2011. Tellingly, one of the founders of ZipCar, Robin Chase, is also the founder of Buzzcar a P2P service in France. I predict 100s of these will be set up in as many cities and only after we figure out how to do it will the market pick a handful of winners.

The key to P2P carsharing work is trust. You need to trust that my car will be clean, safe and operational and I need to trust that you will respect my property. Trusting strangers from whom you might buy something is well-managed with online purchasing from auction sites like eBay or the used book jobbers that trade on Amazon. If you rent your car online—as you would if you were a car owner in a P2P car-share transaction—your reputation (well, your car's reputation) will be gleaned from your users by the site that manages the transaction. But what about the renter's reputation? After all, you will not want your car to be subject to automatic speeding or red-light tickets and parking fines. How will you know if a renter abuses your accelerator or clutch?

There's other things such as insurance and perhaps wanting a different rate from someone who uses your car for two hours to drive a hundred highway miles vs someone using the same two hours to drive just couple of miles to visit his auntie.

Telemetrics systems can address all of this. An in-car meter that measures speed, braking, steering could automatically establish a driver’s reputation for the car owner. While there is no need to track the driver, “driver-style can be calculated as a reputation factor and the car owner can decline or accept further rental requests based on that reputation. While we are at it, the same meter can manage distance traveled, usage-based insurance, even parking payment, bridge or tunnel tolls, and so on.

What is now possible is for P2P car share operators to equip a member’s vehicle with a meter sufficient to calculate the entire trip cost on an equitable usage basis for automatic billing and permit the car owner to select driver style thresholds, so that she need not be concerned with any of these matters.

Collaborative Telemetrics could make P2P carsharing the “Killer App” of 21^st century automobility.

Fair to the poor

The Greater Toronto Area has experienced a noticeable increase in all-day conferences and hefty consulting reports about road pricing and infrastructure funding. A decade ago it was once every few years. Now it’s monthly. Each of these conferences and reports carry the same message–our transportation infrastructure is inadequate, crowded and crumbling. And our purse is empty. While this is true of large cities more often than not, Toronto has it worse than many—Toronto’s population is growing especially rapidly and we have not invested at the rate we should have over the past quarter century.

Reaching Top Speed, a June 2011 report from the Toronto Board of Trade points out that the full bill to refurbish and operate transportation infrastructure in the GTA over the next 25 years—$100 billion, before overruns—is a figure 22% greater than the combined cost of the Big Dig, the Chunnel and the Three Gorges Dam.

This same report identified several “funding tools” the top five of which were road pricing, congestion pricing, fuel tax, regional sales tax, and parking surcharges. These lean heavily toward fees on automotive use, although the rebuild is heavily transit oriented. The report suggests that these could raise $1 billion per year–or about half of the capital expense required for the 25-year plan.

There are important differences among the five tools listed. The most effective for managing gridlock is congestion pricing; the least effective is the sales tax. Congestion pricing is politically the most incendiary; the least is likely sales taxes or parking surcharges. But the touchiest subject is fairness. Among these, congestion or road pricing is often said to be unfair to lower income families.  But is road pricing worse than a sales tax for poorer families?

This problem was looked at recently by Lisa Schweitzer fromUSC and Brian Taylor from UCLA (Access, Spring 2011), albeit in the context of pure road funding. As we choose amongst funding tools, we should weigh their observations.

As a funding mechanism, sales taxes are collected pennies at a time and hidden in many transactions making it virtually impossible to see what one is paying for roads. Sales taxes make the poorest households worse off since the people in these households are paying something while driving little—certainly much less than people from richer households. This makes increasing regional sales taxes to fund roads doubly regressive.

Road use fees, which can be made fully transparent, take money from only those that use the roads, i.e., mostly middle- and higher-income families. Schweitzer and Taylor find that switching from tolls to sales taxes shifts the burden from users to non-users and away from middle-income people onto both the rich and the poor–i.e., road tolls are better than sales taxes for the lowest-income families (although they increase pre-existing access barriers).

How any of us pay for good urban transportation is a very complex social issue—hence the burgeoning industry in conferences and consultant reports, and the dearth of workable solutions.

Toronto’s same old road-pricing script

(updated 2011.06.08)
The past 12 days have produced a noisy buzz of articles in the Toronto Star regarding the need to use road-pricing of one sort or another to raise capital for GTHA transportation needs and to quell congestion. The basic script for the discourse this past week is identical to the script playing in every city and every country for the past 15 years (this week's example from Oz!):

Experts: “We need road-pricing!”

Drivers: “ We don’t want it!”

Politicians: “And we won’t do it!”

Journalists: “There is no solution, the sky is falling!”

Repeat…

One exception to the above script is a Star editorial, presumably written by a journalist, that says: “We have no choice but to use road pricing, so get over it.” The Star is half right—the no choice part is correct. But we are not simply going to “just get over it”. 

It turns out the Experts are correct—we must deploy tolling. The Drivers are right—they really don’t want tolling. And the Politicians are telling the truth (this time)—they won’t do it.  The only ones who are wrong are the journalists—because there is a solution.

That solution involves the voluntary selection of services, privileges, rewards and discounts in exchange for behavioral changes. Think of an analogy to the Airmiles™ system, but far, far richer. This approach, already tried and proven viable in France, Holland and the United States (among others), can be accomplished using automated, self-enforcing, privacy-assured, in-car road-use meters. It is possible, given current telemetric technologies to measure where and when a vehicle is driven or parked and to calculate, using a secure on-board database, rewards and discounts based on behaviors such as eco-driving, reduction in car-use, avoidance of peak hours, use of smaller vehicles, avoidance of congested routes, etc.  Rewards can include parking cash-outs, or transit passes.  Parking discounts or transit passes can be provided for not moving a vehicle during peak times or in congested areas or for using an alternative vehicle. Services include traveler services and pay-as-you-drive insurance that can save drivers money while reducing congestion. Privileges can include a guarantee of no parking tickets, graduated parking access to HOT lanes, fuel-tax rebates in exchange for road-pricing and parking spot reservation via a related parking finder.

It is possible to reward drivers based on comparative behavior.  If the monthly aggregate driving behavior of several thousand drivers were established, drivers in the upper deciles could be rewarded (automatically, without disclosure of location) via discounts to their service accounts.  There are literally hundreds of easy ideas such as this that a road-use metering system can automate. If a couple dozen were made available, there would be “something for everyone”. Some drivers would in fact save money, rather than pay more, as most journalists assume.

Such a system would be operated by private industry, bolstered by distributing consumer rewards from urban retailers seeking business, regulated by government to ensure equitableness, privacy and access, and (eventually) would permit switching from fuel tax to road-use fees.

A study by RAND (October 2010) described this (section 6.2.3), and NYCDOT currently has a RFEI asking private industry how they might set this up.

So it is possible. And it will be done. And it can start soon—this year, if someone wanted to. It just won’t be done by government mandate... 

Hepburn: Ford is right, toll roads are nuts

Bob Hepburn June 08, 2011. Tolls and congestion fees mere cash grabs on motorists with no realistic option except to drive to work.

Pros and cons of road tolls

June 08, 2011. Denial on tolls needs to end, Editorial, June 4

Cohn: Legislature united against road tolls and carbon taxes

Martin Regg Cohn June 08, 2011. Remember the environment? In Ontario, pollution has slipped from mainstream to slipstream.

Editorial: Denial on road tolls needs to end 
June 04, 2011. Two authorities — one provincial and the other working for Toronto — agree road tolls are needed to pay for key public transit projects. 

GTA needs gas hikes, road tolls, congestion charges to fund transit: Experts 
Brett Popplewell June 04, 2011. Add all these charges and this city might solve the gridlock that has Toronto moving more slowly than almost any other city in the Western world. 

Oslo does it, Stockholm does it, London does it 
Brett Popplewell June 04, 2011. Congestion charging and tolled highways are inevitable for Toronto, according to Harry Kitchen, a professor of economics at Trent University. It’s just a matter of the public and the politicians accepting the reality that this city, in its current state, is grinding to a halt. Why? Because roadways are jammed... 

65% of Torontonians say no to road tolls; 72% want bike lanes 
David Rider June 03, 2011. Torontonians strongly oppose the idea of road tolls to pay for Mayor Rob Ford’s promised Sheppard subway line, says a new opinion poll. 

Road tolls worth considering 
May 31, 2011. Road toll ‘reality check’ stirs up Toronto council, May 28 

Watchdog recommends road tolls to reduce traffic, pollution 
May 31, 2011. Ontario’s environmental watchdog is recommending a “serious discussion” be held on road tolls to lessen traffic and reduce greenhouse gases. 

Go with road tolls, Environment Commissioner tells GTA 
Richard J. Brennan May 31, 2011. Ontario Environment Commissioner Gord Miller is pushing for more toll roads in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area to reduce single-passenger traffic. 

Mayor Ford won’t support tolls to fund Sheppard extension 
Daniel Dale and Paul Moloney May 30, 2011. Doug Ford, the mayor’s brother and trusted adviser, said emphatically that “road tolls are not going to happen.” 

James: Sheppard subway? Not now, maybe not ever 
Royson James May 30, 2011. The Sheppard subway extension is a lost cause as NIMBY residents, council opposition and high cost conspire to kill the plan. 

Road toll ‘reality check’ stirs up Toronto council 
Madhavi Acharya-Tom Yew May 28, 2011 

James: Ford’s subways will require tolls and grants 
Royson James May 28, 2011. It will likely take new road tolls and congestion charges and other revenue tools to help deliver “the biggest transit deal in North America, or perhaps the world,” says the man hired to pave the path toward the $4 billion Sheppard Subway. An exclusive report by the Star finds that new road tolls and congestion charges will be needed to deliver the $4B Sheppard subway.

Fork in the Road

By now you know that prices for carbon-based fuels will continue to go up more frequently and more aggressively than they will be coming down. You already appreciate that this makes the extraction of costlier and dirtier carbon fuels more likely—fuels like oil from tar sands, coal, and natural gas from fracking. Likely you also appreciate that since these fuels can only increase in costs, this is what has been making innovations in alternative vehicles and fuels more attractive for innovators and investors.

This means there are two competing ways out of the corner into which we are painted. One will impose changes in modal choices and on how and where we build and live. The other, on the kinds of cars we drive and energy we use. Hence we will soon arrive at a societal decision point that I am arbitrarily targeting for 2020, alluding to useful puns on “good vision” and “hindsight”. This is also far enough away that my predictions will be forgotten giving me some freedom from fear of retribution for my heresy.

I propose that we think about this 2020 decision point as a fork in the road called “Cars-as-we-now-know-them”. I propose that at this fork, we have two fundamental choices. Toward the Right, we have the “New Automobility”—alternate forms of energy for mobility. Regardless of whether this is biofuels, electricity, compressed air or fuel cells, motive force will increasingly originate from renewables such as solar, wind and a dozen other ways to trap the sun. This route will make cars, energy, and mobility greener, cheaper and more plentiful. We will have more cars and generate more VMT. Congestion will threaten every last spare minute, and we will have a devil of a problem to fund infrastructure. The more of us that take the Right branch, the greater our societal evolution—and the more we will need road pricing.

Toward the Left, we have the “New Modalities”—we will change our modal mix to tons more of carpooling, vanpooling, transit, biking, walking, telework and moving toward the center of dense cities. This route means changes in transit and urban livability and in health, settlement density and planning. The more of us that take the Left branch, the greater our societal revolution—and the more we will need road pricing.

I have traveled both branches of this fork in my thinking over the past nine years, first the Left branch, then the Right. That is in the permanent record. Good people line both branches. We will not make uniform choices, but perhaps we can make informed ones. The question now is: “which approach will dominate the final numbers?”

Will we turn 50% toward New Modalities and 50% toward New Automobility? Or will it be 10:1 in favor of one or the other? The evidence, I argue is in favor of the New Automobility—simply because it is the path of least resistance.  Rather than moralize, just look at the mathematical imperatives of entitlement, habit, culture, innovation, investment, desire, fear and inertia. To set these things aside in favor of pure and correct systems thinking makes us worse than blinkered.

We need to explore both branches, dark or light, of the fork we are arriving at.  At least as we start making these choices in the coming years, someone will have thought about their consequences. In the end, thoughtful solutions are all that can win the future back for us (or not).

Millions of Dollars in Free Parking

I live on the east side of Toronto, a dozen blocks from the Greenwood subway entrance. Last Friday, I wanted to lunch with a friend at Islington and Bloor. To take my car would cost me about $8.00 in gas, lease, and wear. Rather than drive, it made sense to park my car a block or two away from the Greenwood station and use the subway. It would be at least as fast (it was midday), it would be cheaper given Gaddafi gas prices, I would get a couple of blocks of exercise, and I could read a book about traffic congestion (a personal obsession) on the train.

Four superb and completely selfish reasons.

Pleased with my plan, I drove off. When I got near the Greenwood station, the nearest street was marked one-hour parking. Made sense — can’t have tons of folks like me crowding out these local residents. I went North to the next street. One-hour parking. And the next one, too. So I went up one more and finally ended up parking four blocks north of the Coxwell station in the wrong direction. I had in essence “cruised” an extra 1.5 km looking for free parking while passing well over 100 empty one-hour spaces — I figured I needed three hours in total and did not wish to risk a $30 ticket.

These one-hour spaces, on all the residential streets three or four blocks on either side of our subway lines—and around other major facilities that are either poorly or expensively served by parking lots (the East Toronto hospital is one example)—form radii of parking spaces constrained to one-hour parking to prevent abuse. Makes sense. Or does it?

The great majority of these one-hour spaces remain empty after the residents leave for work and until they return home. If left unmanaged, they would be filled by freeloaders— such as me—who would leave their car in front of a stranger’s house and take public transportation to save $10 or $20 in downtown parking fees. One can argue that having people who live a couple of kilometers from a subway station use one of these residential areas and take subway rather than drive downtown (I know many who do this) would do three things: (1) reduce vehicle kilometers traveled for all such commute trips; (2) put more riders on the subway; and (3) raise revenue to help maintain the streets and sidewalks of those residential areas—thereby reducing the property-tax demand for those residents.

I would have been happy to pay $.50 or $.75 an hour for a spot a block away from Greenwood—more if the weather was crappy. The city has an opportunity here, to manage those spaces for the benefit of the residents living there, and for the benefit of Torontonians who live less close to the subway. Benefits include: increased transit use, lower emissions, less congestion, saving money for drivers, reducing property tax demands for the residents affected. The only losers in this are the downtown parking garages. But if the scheme I am about to describe were operated by Toronto Parking Authority’s GreenP, then the TPA would not need to lose a nickel.

How to do it

In order to execute such a scheme, participating vehicles must be self-metered and self-enforced. The reason is the city can ill afford to add new curbside parking meters or new signage , or a new army of parking enforcement officers. As it is now, these one-hour parking areas must be visited twice to apply tire-marking enforcement methods—a very expensive matter—which leads to a strategy of occasional spot-enforcement anyway (I get ticketed maybe once in ten for violating these restrictions).

Such self-managed meters already exist. Using a new technology called financial-grade GPS, they use a completely private method of determining the correct parking fee based on an internal parking “price-map”. Each meter is unique to a participating vehicle, pays parking monthly either on a debit or credit bases and never reveals the location of the vehicle to any party other than the driver. (There is a 100% driver-private way for the parking operator to audit the system—no person can get to know where a spouse is parked since location data does not leave the vehicle).

So a commuter who wished to park in one of these areas would affix a meter, which is the size of smartphone, on her windshield behind the rearview mirror. A small indicator lamp shows that the meter is working so that a parking enforcement officer can safely ignore any legally parked vehicle (blocking driveways and fire-hydrants are citable matters, of course). The absence of a lit indicator lamp that shows a device that is tampered or nonoperational, and such vehicles would receive citations exactly as though they had no meter—no need to get Draconian over tampering a device you volunteered to put in your own vehicle!

Parking officers who enforce these one-hour free parking areas would do exactly what they always do, while simply ignoring any correctly parked vehicle with a correctly flashing indicator lamp.

Participating commuters may prepay or post pay as the city may prefer. In fact both could be offered.

Lest this appear somewhat complicated for a few million dollars and a few hundred thousand parking spots that may be 20% or 30% utilized, consider that this same technology can manage residential parking reducing the fees for residents who may park less on their streets when they travel or when they put their car in their driveway or who may agree pay to park on another residential street to visit late or overnight. Consider that the same technology can manage any street parking—later on. Consider that any participating commuter who drives a hybrid for all electric vehicle could be given a 20% discount when using Toronto Parking Authorities facilities (the technology works for garages as well).

But the most powerful single value for self-enforced time and place-based parking meters is the management innovation of Dave Hill (until recently Chief Operating Officer, Winnipeg Parking Authority). Calling it “Graduated Parking”, he set up a pilot that permitted the use of on-street parking to extend beyond the initial two-hour limit of participating parkers who were willing to pay an increasing fee for each 15-minute parking time slice. This method even permits the first hour to be free, if the City wishes to grandfather this privilege.

With prices appropriately designed, parkers who stay beyond a normal one, two or three hour limit will pay a slightly heftier fee for the extra time, but being self enforced will require no citation. This permits the city’s parking enforcement staff to manage more square miles of onstreet parking with the same staff contingent while reducing city court costs and increasing revenues—revenues that are needed for our streets and sidewalks...

...revenues that can help keep a lid on Toronto residential property taxes—which is in line with Mayor Ford’s promise to hold the line on property taxes.