For the lack of education and trust

Here is a revealing chart re fuel taxes from Economist.com on 24 March 2008. It explains why Brits are more aggressively opposed to road pricing than are Yanks... if you drove in Britain and you thought that road pricing would be in addition instead of a substitution, wouldn't you complain?

The two biggest barriers to the needed tax shift from fuel to road-use are:

1. education of motorists and politicians that fuel taxes engender congestion and that road charges relieve it; motorists should be begging for the change.
   
2. trust that governments would switch instead of add; so far they have been added because no technology has existed that permits this shift, until now.

Parking Pricing more important than Road Pricing

Last year, TIME printed a very readable explanation of why parking pricing is likely more important than congestion pricing for battling urban congestion. Here is the full article (The New Science of Parking, Ceri Au, 2007-07-09):

If you live in a city and drive a car, chances are you know the hassles of looking for a place to park. Studies of traffic congestion in New York and Los Angeles have found that cruising for parking is, in fact, a major source of gridlock. In a 2006 study undertaken in a Brooklyn neighborhood by Transportation Alternatives, a New York-based advocacy group, 45% of drivers interviewed admitted they were simply looking for a parking spot. A more rigorous analysis was conducted in Los Angeles by Dr. Donald Shoup, an urban planning professor at UCLA and one of the nation's top parking gurus. Over the course of a year, he and his students found, the search for curb parking in a 15-block business district "created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel — equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon," which consumes "47,000 gallons of gas and produces 730 tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide."

Urban planners and economists have been trying for years to find solutions to the plethora of traffic problems that afflict urban communities. Now a growing number of cities are turning to the relatively new science of parking theory and the technologies it has spawned for help — to improve their neighborhoods, reduce pollution and kick-start economic growth.

Shoup's solution to reducing congestion due to cruising — which he chronicles in his book The High Cost of Free Parking — begins by raising the cost of street parking to market value. That requires the installation of meters where none currently exist and the setting of rates for metered spots that is proportional to the prices charged in off-street lots. Such market-value parking is not simply a cash-grab; it is about obtaining an optimal balance between occupancy and vacancy. "Ensuring 85% occupancy means that the curb spaces will be well used," says Shoup, "and the 15% vacancy means that they will be readily available."

The idea of market-value pricing to reduce congestion has been around at least since 1952, when economist William Vickery floated the idea to relieve congestion in New York City. But it was not until 1996, when Vickery received a Nobel Prize in economics, that his work, and the idea of congestion pricing, began attracting attention. The lack of early support for market-pricing, says Patrick Siegman, a principal transit consultant with Nelson/Nygaard, was mostly rooted in an inability to measure results. "New technologies are making it much easier to implement ideas that economists have been suggesting for a long time," he says, "and that is leading to some remarkable changes in parking policy."

A San Francisco-based company called Streetline, for example, offers what CEO Tod Dykstra calls a "congestion management system," which includes parking sensors and wireless networked meters. The sensors, engineered using the same principles that make a compass operate, create a unique parking signature for each vehicle, which can determine, based on variations in parking angles and size of vehicles, when a parking space is filled, when a vehicle departs and when a new vehicle replaces it. Wireless networked meters enable parking officials to instantly determine not only who pays up and who doesn't, but also the total revenue for parking by meter, by street and by district based on time of day or day of the week.

So far, Streetline has completed pilot projects and studies for Los Angeles and San Francisco. The L.A. project determined that despite two-hour time limits, the average driver stays parked for four hours. If a city wants to balance the occupancy and vacancy rates to ensure drivers can easily find a spot, they need to understand parking behavior and determine whether drivers obey the rules, and adjust those rules accordingly. Since the technology services offered by companies like Streetline are no more expensive, and often cheaper, than the upkeep of old-fashioned coin meters, smart parking management is starting to catch on.

One city that has fully instituted Shoup's market-pricing plan for street parking is Redwood City, Calif. In 2005 the city council unanimously voted to remove time limits for parking in the downtown core. Additionally, they tasked the city's Parking Manager with ensuring that Shoup's 85/15 formula was maintained throughout the designated zone by adjusting prices based on occupancy. Though rate hikes at parking meters may sound more like political suicide than popular public policy, the move drew wide support, because all revenue generated was returned to the metered zone community, either through direct services or through infrastructure development.

Advocates of the Redwood City plan pointed to the success in the early '90s of a similar program in Pasadena, Calif., which implemented metered parking in a skid row neighborhood called Old Town. Local businesses at first feared that metered parking would drive away existing customers. But when revenue was returned to the district in the form of graffiti removal and new light fixtures on the streets, business actually improved. More than a decade later, Old Town Pasadena is a thriving community known for fine dining and shopping. With parking revenue in excess of $1 million a year, its streets receive biweekly steam-cleaning.

Shoup claims that such success stories are propelling grassroots support for increasing parking fees. "Once you get an alliance between green groups interested in environmental issues and public welfare, combined with business interests keen to improve profit margins, you produce a very powerful lobbying force," he says.

But will larger cities pick up on the idea? A 2006 congestion study undertaken by Partnership for New York, a nonprofit organization comprising 200 of the city's top CEOs, reported that traffic congestion costs New York City $13 billion in lost revenue and 50, 000 jobs annually. Among the study's recommendations for further consideration was increasing the price of curb parking. "In a city where garage parking spots are sold for the price of a new car and where garage parking fees can be as high as $15 to $20 for the first hour," the study noted, "on-street parking, the most convenient and most sought after by drivers, costs about $2 to $3 in Manhattan."

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, with the support of 130 advocacy groups, has proposed a different type of congestion-pricing for dealing with traffic: instituting a toll on drivers who enter Manhattan from the outer boroughs. But Shoup is skeptical that such a toll will significantly reduce congestion. [here, too]

"Much of the traffic in Manhattan is caused by drivers who are searching for a free curb parking space," he says. "It doesn't make sense to charge cars to enter Manhattan without also charging to park on the streets. You have to charge to manage. You can't manage parking if you can't charge for it." And American drivers have clearly demonstrated that if there is a bargain to be had, they will circle the block for a parking space — and keep circling until they find it.

The Greening of Our Cars is Oversold

I have long thought that the greening of our cars will have little or no impact on the total problem. In fact, I think it will make congestion worse, since emissions-guilt will no long play a role.

Michael Replogle says it brilliantly: "The forecast growth in motor vehicle traffic--60% over the next two decades in the U.S. and many times that in China and India--threatens to overwhelm gains won through increasing vehicle fuel efficiency." Here's the whole article...


Solutions Michael Replogle 03.19.08, 6:00 AM ET

There is huge potential for fuel-efficient cars and low-carbon fuels to reduce transportation's impact on climate change and public health. But technological developments alone won't be enough to solve these problems.

A key arena for innovation will be finding ways to grow the world's communities and economies while at the same time reducing how much driving the population is doing. The forecast growth in motor vehicle traffic--60% over the next two decades in the U.S. and many times that in China and India--threatens to overwhelm gains won through increasing vehicle fuel efficiency.

Unfortunately, some techno-fixes like biofuels, electric vehicles and hydrogen-fueled transportation have been oversold. While they hold long-term promise, truly green versions of these options are still many years away from delivering major pollution reductions. Managing traffic will not only curb CO2 but also make cities more economically efficient, healthy and livable.

The key to success is to keep car traffic from growing to unsustainable levels to begin with. A 2007 Urban Land Institute study found that shifting two-thirds of new U.S. growth to compact neighborhoods where cars are not the only transportation option would save 85 million tons of CO2 annually by 2030. That figure is more than the combined annual emissions of over 16 million regular passenger cars.

California's San Joaquin Valley recently adopted financial incentives to encourage developers to design subdivisions that reduce the need to drive. This helps cut emissions while providing better choices for consumers and reducing costs overall.

Most cities would also benefit from bus rapid transit systems that delivers high-speed, high-capacity, flexible public transportation at a fraction of the cost and time, while serving many more destinations than traditional rail transit.

Getting incentives right for drivers and commuters is also important, and there is plenty of precedent. London and Stockholm have cut greenhouse-gas emissions from vehicles in their city centers by 15% with congestion pricing (charging motorists to enter the central area during peak hours). Germany charges trucks with dirty engines higher tolls on its nationwide Autobahn network with GPS satellite toll collection.

This has doubled the rate at which old vehicles are replaced by new, clean ones. Pay-as-you-drive insurance, which rewards drivers who drive less by setting premiums by the mile, could reduce Americans' driving by 10% or more.

On a growing number of roads from Singapore to San Diego, tolls are being adjusted by the time of day to ensure roads operate efficiently without congestion, with revenues funding better public transportation. New information feedback systems are optimizing passenger and freight routings. In Yorkshire, England, performance contracts tie the road manager's earnings to how well traffic moves.

Traffic management is powerful. But maximizing its benefits will require the right incentives, such as rewarding carbon reductions equally--whether they come from greener cars or smarter infrastructure. In the end, shrinking our carbon footprint will require better infrastructure, expanded low-impact travel choices and incentives for wise consumption and stewardship of the resources that get us from here to there.

Michael Replogle is transportation director of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Sick of being stuck

I love New York more and more. An organization called Transportation Alternatives advocates for bicycling, walking and public transit. Kinda like Grushhour only waaaay bigger ;-)

Today, they sent me a news email prompting a last minute drive to push congestion pricing through the City's legal process. I copy it here to illustrate what a more mature North American city looks like when they want to take their city back...

We Need Your Help to Pass Congestion Pricing

There are 12 days left to win congestion pricing. After that, NYC takes a pass on the $354 million provided by the federal government to cover the transit expansion necessary to put congestion pricing in place.

To ensure that a future with fewer cars, well-funded public transit and more livable streets doesn't slip away, T.A. is pulling out all the stops. We are hitting the streets this Saturday to generate THOUSANDS of letters to the elected officials who represent us.

We need dozens of organizers to join this historic effort. We need you! From Flatbush to Broadway to Steinway to Fordham Road, our teams will make this last critical push to put constituents in touch with as-yet undecided elected officials and help win congestion pricing. If you need more of a reason to pitch in, we can pay $15+ per hour for your efforts. We need you to help put pricing over the top and set the green street revolution in motion.

So... is THAT what green looks like?

Congestion as Treason

This theme of comparing our tolerance for traffic congestion to the old Soviet ways keeps showing up. Today in the Washington Post, an article by Lyndsey Layton and Spencer Hsu, shared space with a short slide show. One of the frames pictured this:
D.J. Gribbin, the Transportation Department's general counsel and a supporter of congestion pricing, said, "It's almost sort of un-American that we should be forced to sit and be stuck in traffic." (Photo by Nikki Kahn - The Washington Post)

If you are much older than 50 you may well know that the phrase "un-American" was Cold War code for an activity by an American that might a tad treasonous. Congestion as Treason. Words well chosen, Mr Gribbin.

While "treason" may be a stretch, perhaps we could settle for "insane".

Network Musings

Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar and contributor to solutions for urban mobility is a kindred thinker. One of her current companies is Meadow Networks. (The other is goloco, a pretty interesting idea, as well.) If reading is a challenge, you can watch her, instead.

Mesh networks were where I started my congestion-pricing thinking in 2002 before I was persuaded that once Location Anonymity* was feasible, global navigation satellites were the only way to replace the fuel tax. To be fair, that's a simplification, a re-ordering of events -- I did think a lot about mesh networks, and I did find a solution to privacy protection, and I did think navigation satellites were the only way to be universal - i.e., interoperable everywhere without any new infrastructure (actually without any ground infrastructure at all), but I did not fully understand until 2007 that congestion is essentially kept in place by taxing the wrong thing. By then I was already five years into this. But with such fabulous hindsight, we now have perfect social and economic motivation for these inventions.

But here is why I introduce you to Robin's thinking and that of one of her advisers, Andrew Blumberg, a postdoc at Stanford: there are not a lot of people thinking about congestion cessation AND the preservation of our last shreds of privacy, but I do not think we can have one without the other -- i.e., without a privacy solution, we won't see universal GPS-based tolling. Evidently, neither do Robin and Andrew.

Furthermore, the intersection of satellite tolling and mesh networks opens some amazing opportunities for valuable real-time services. Tolling, per se, has no requirement to be real-time, but things like parking finders, congestion-based navigation, probe vehicles do. Mesh-networks could add a lot of value in urban settings, while satellite tolling would retain the requisite universality so that any country wishing to replace the fuel tax could.
___________________________
* Andrew and Robin calls it "Locational Privacy", which they define as "the ability to walk in public space and drive on public roads with the expectation that one's movements are not being tracked or recorded for later analysis". Meadow's and Skymeter's methods are different. But both ensure you are untrackable.

And that is a good thing. Having multiple ways to protect privacy sends an important message to motorists: We can move from pay-by-tank-full to pay-by-road-use without exposing anyone's sexual shenanigans. My personal ad hoc research says that is indeed what people are really worried about. I have been asked at every talk I give "will my wife be able to know where I am?" Even a local high-profile radio host asked me in a pre-recorded session "Can anyone see if I turn into a strip-joint?" (it was expunged). No woman has asked me the mirror question (perhaps because they are more discreet), nor has any tax evader asked me whether his government will know he has an unregistered job. To be plain, here, I am suggesting that the single greatest adversary to congestion pricing is marital infidelity, and not the polite-but-boring economic argument called "market pricing is better than free-road entitlement". What Robin and I are saying is that congestion can be fixed even while your neighbor continues his philandering.

Secretary Peters: Tipping Point

For most of the past century, fuel taxes, regardless of how they have been spent, seemed to provide the right amount of revenue and were dead easy to collect. Today that picture is changing. The amount of tax collected is declining in relation to the funding demands of building and maintaining roads. You likely know the long-standing reasons: it is politically unpopular to raise fuel taxes, more efficient engines take heavier vehicles longer distances while consuming less fuel, and capital and operating costs of roads are steadily increasing.

Newer pressures to clean up our emissions and devise alternate power sources exacerbate the problem, and now it is becoming evident to more transport ministers that the fuel tax is a root cause of congestion. No longer a question of whether governments should collect more tax, it is now a question of which they should collect.

In this perfect storm, how can the fuel tax survive?

In the spring of 2004, British Transport Secretary, Alastair Darling went on record as the world’s first Transport Minister to formally propose a move from fuel taxes to road user charging. He proposed a satellite-based, nation-wide, variable time, distance and place charge. Motorists would pay by the mile, depending on where and when they drove. He called it “a radically different approach”.

And a radically good one, too. Tax shifting is the most powerful underused tool in the arsenal to fight environmental degradation according to Donna Morton, Executive Director of the Centre for Integral Economics.

At the time, Professor Stephen Glaister of Imperial College, London, one of the panelists that produced the precedent feasibility report, cited concerns for the sheer scale and expense of "an astronomic IT exercise", the difficulties of locating vehicles among tall buildings and the possibility of jamming weak radio signals.

It is now four years later, and not only is satellite tolling (GNSS) still seen the right approach, but that assumption has grown more accepted, almost self-evident. Long-time British thought-leader, Ian Catling, has grown impatient with EU governments’ lack of appreciation for GNSS interoperability – a critical attribute that removes an important barrier to the universal use that is needed in order to replace fuel taxes.

In those four intervening years technology has improved and countries such as the Dutch, Danish, British and others have been testing it. Each year GPS-metering reliability has improved to the point where the Transport Minister of the Netherlands, Camiel Eurlings, and his country’s Parliament have decided to proceed with their National road pricing system, Kilometerprijs, to deploy over the five years starting with 2011. Granted, their Parliament backed away from wholesale replacement of the fuel tax and will remove a few fixed vehicle taxes such as registration, instead, but the fuel tax has so safe haven there. Once the system to collect universal usage fees is in place, motorists will lobby to have the older tax removed in favour of the fairer and more effective distance charge. Only the minority who travel farther than average benefit from the fuel tax – and the environment always suffers from it. The more that taxes are skewed toward taxing road consumption and away from taxing fuel consumption the more effective is our lever on congestion.

The single substantive argument for the fuel tax, as put forward by Steven Norris (President of UK ITS) and Jack Schenendorf (Co-Chair of the US-DOT National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission), is that it is very easy to collect and that, they assume, no other technology could match its low operating costs.

Fortunately for the ministers who see beyond easy collectibility, that technology is now here – and several companies are perfecting it. It will soon be possible to collect road-use charges in a reliable and private manner, using a mobile, GPS-based technology that will be distributed and managed in exactly the same way that current mobile telephony is managed. Indeed this will have the side benefit of bolstering that industry in regions where mobile telephony services are saturating.

So with the two ministers mentioned earlier and Singapore’s Minister Raymond Lim decreasing vehicle taxes while raising road-use charges, the perfect storm described above, and the dawning of a technology to provide low-cost collection of road user charges, what a propitious time for Mary Peters, Secretary, U.S. Department of Transportation, to join the line of transport ministers who see that the fuel tax is the problem. Because of her county’s size and influence, her stance represents a tipping point.

I recently lauded the Secretary for her refusal to endorse her Commission’s Report: “Toward a New Surface Transportation Economic Model” because of its over dependence on fuel tax escalation. Now she’s released a white paper that beautifully details the several faults of fuel taxes – its ineffectiveness at reducing congestion, its inefficient use of resources, its unsustainability, and its unpopularly compared to effective alternatives. To have a Transport Minister write this, rather than a tweedy economist in a think tank, makes a huge difference.

Peters proposes to solve the problem with “direct pricing of road use, similar to how people pay for other utilities”. She outlines the three major policy objectives that it achieves: [1] the reduction of congestion and delivery of substantial economic benefits, [2] generation of “revenues for re-investment in precisely the locations that need the investment most”, and [3] the reduction of emissions of carbon and traditional pollutants.

It has been difficult to watch the rise and fall of the UK’s National Road Pricing program. It has been a consolation that the Dutch have now risen to the challenge, but the size of The Netherlands didn’t turn heads as did the UK. And Singapore is so far ahead the pack that we don’t dare compare ourselves.

The United States’ joining this movement will hasten the biggest shift in world surface transportation since trucks replaced rail after the Second War.

Thank you, Secretary Peters!

Applauding Mary Peters

At the mid-January Transportation Research Board’s 87th Annual Meeting, a staggering number of sessions were dedicated to transportation demand management, congestion pricing, value pricing, road tolling, HOT lanes, road user charging, and everything else that said the fuel taxes were at the root of unsustainability of our surface transport system. If you weren’t there to meditate on bridge construction, aggregates or traffic signals, you were there to pray for our surface transport network. There was no mistaking the general urgency: we have to find a way to solve the highway funding crisis, address congestion and reduce emissions. And while perhaps not unanimous, a majority of us look to market mechanisms as the sustainable way to address them.

An early session: Emerging Debate About New Systems for Transportation Finance and Funding Approaches for the Future had a panel of four senior transportation thinkers. Among them was Commission Vice-Chair, Jack Schenendorf to provide a Perspective from the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Commission. The Commission’s Report was to be released 48 hours later. A stream of questions from the audience evoked the same answer, “I can’t answer that until Tuesday, but I think you will be very pleased with the Commission’s Report”.

Man we were excited. Commission Chair, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters, has been very public in her opinion that the architecture of the gas tax was at the root of the problem – that we are taxing the wrong thing. Commissioner Maria Cino, Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Transportation had described the Commission’s work thus: “…it will be the tough choices that we have to make and really, I think, being bold, and doing not a lot of what’s been done before...”

Finally, we could anticipate a coherent, thoughtful body of intelligent recommendations to address the problems of the economically inefficient gas tax and strangled road networks – and that Congress would understand and act on it.

Why then did we see three of 12 commissioners, including Peters and Cino vote against accepting the Report? Because in advocating an increase in gas tax while hedging their bets on pricing research and trials, the Report authors failed to teach how to create sustainable, efficient funding mechanisms. In Peters’ Minority View, this “…promotes relative indifference to the revenue mechanisms themselves so long as adequate revenue is generated.”

Commissioners Peters, Cino and Rick Geddes refused to vote for a Band-Aid.

Kudos to them.

Traffic in your trousers

On a video from THE STRAITS TIMES of Singapore, The Singapore Transport Minister, Raymond Lim used my second favorite congestion analogy: “So saying ‘Let’s deal with congestion by building more roads’ is like telling a person who is suffering from obesity that ‘the solution to your problem is to buy bigger trousers with a larger waistline’. It is not a sustainable solution.”

He went on to explain why Singapore is lowering the fixed upfront taxes for vehicles (those are the ones we just raised here in Toronto) while simultaneously raising the road-use fees (those are the ones we are anxious might happen here in Toronto). (And, don’t worry; Singapore is building some new roads too.)

His reasoning for a $110M (15%) cut in vehicle taxes: “The critical thing for a person when they make a decision whether to drive a car … or to own a car … is after they purchase it is the out of pocket expenses. That’s key. They have to make a decision whether they are going to make that extra car trip and how you are going to make that extra car trip. That is why what we have done through the years is to shift greater reliance on usage [charges] while lowering the upfront costs. Because the minute a person pays the upfront costs the behaviour pattern is such that you forget it. What comes to their mind is really what it costs for that extra trip."

Saying this, Minister Lim has explained clearly how pricing signals work. High up-front costs and low operating costs encourages driving. Lower up-front costs and higher operating costs discourages driving. The Minister is not saying “tax more”, but rather “tax differently”. What he and the US Secretary of Transportation, Mary Peters, and many others are saying is that our tax structures are a major root cause of congestion. We simply tax the wrong things.

Singapore has at least a decade of experience ahead of Toronto. We would do well to take an economics lesson from them.

Objections to Road Pricing in Toronto

The idea of road pricing has been floated in Toronto uncountable times over the past five years. Compared to cities that have gone before, it’s all the same and it’s all different. [download the PDF]

Early on, road pricing thinking in Toronto was predominantly congestion related as it was during the 2003 and 2006 mayoral campaigns. There have been the obligatory comparisons with London, as dozens of other cities have made. Toronto’s Mayor David Miller even sent one of Toronto’s Councillors over to see London’s system first-hand.

For a modest period it was environmentally related. In the summer of 2007 Toronto released its Climate Change, Clean Air and Sustainable Energy Action Plan, in which appeared a statement that “the city will work with the Province [and other local authorities] to investigate a road pricing regime for the GTA that will encourage people to use alternative modes of transportation, and dedicate any funds raised to transit improvements.”

More recently it has been almost entirely funding related. On February 21 2008, Toronto released a commission report entitled: Blueprint for Fiscal Stability and Economic Prosperity, which included a strong recommendation that the arterials around Toronto be tolled. Since many of these are under Provincial jurisdiction this cannot be undertaken without regional (i.e., provincial administration).

The Mayor has been quoted several times as saying he favors the idea of road pricing as a last resort, but that it needs to be a wide-area mandate – essentially a provincially administered initiative. Since the Blueprint report, Ontario’s Minister of Transportation, Jim Bradley, has been quoted as saying the province has no intention of tolling its existing “400-series” highways, but that the Mayor of Toronto, who has been recently granted certain new taxation powers, is free to toll those under city jurisdiction, such as the two limited access congestionways: the Gardiner and the Don Valley Parkway.

But tolling the roads you can toll for financial reasons instead of the ones that you should toll for demand-management reasons can have unintended effects. Network demand management requires at least some finesse. Attaching a toll to one small part disturbs the system unevenly.

Same old?

In some ways, traffic congestion is the same everywhere. It has similar causes and similar harms. Sandwiched between its minority advocates and its minority detractors is a majority of motorists who are against it – usually around 60-70%.

But no detractor, no local politician and certainly no effected motorist is interested in a general economic theory of the effect of market pricing on network efficiency. However much the common good may be harmed by congestion and emissions, most of us prize our purse more. Even Al Gore’s message fades in the face of a tax bill. And however much government may indeed be running out of money, a majority of citizens believe the money can be found elsewhere – certainly not from their entitled drive to work.

But in other ways, no two cities’ political and urban landscapes are identical with respect to congestion and congestion pricing. One of the truisms that challenge advocates (and aids detractors) is that London, Stockholm and Singapore are not only not like each other, they are also not like any other city.

Specifically, they are not like Toronto.

So when cities like New York and now Toronto begin a public debate about road user charging or congestion pricing, they variously think they have everything or nothing to learn from the cities that have stumbled through this before us.

The truth, as always, falls in between, and in this minefield of opinion the truth can be hard to tease out. No one has yet gotten it exactly right and there is merit to both sides of each argument. But there are a few things that I am as sure of for Toronto as for any other city.

1. We will argue that it is not acceptable.

A majority of Toronto motorists will be against road pricing. This will change to a minority once a suitably designed scheme is in place. This has happened in London, Stockholm, and Singapore. It has not yet happened in Dubai where an incomplete scheme diverts rather than reduces traffic.

A suitably designed scheme has to be fair. Tolling just two major arteries (the Gardiner feeding in from the southwest and the DVP feeding in from the northeast), forces a minority subset of motorists to shoulder the whole road-tolling bill. This means some will possibly overpay for driving their vehicle while others will continue to underpay. In fact, elasticity effects will encourage more driving from those who are not paying, because the roads will be somewhat less congested and parking will be somewhat more available. This compounds the unfairness, while diminishing the desired congestion effects.

Every road-pricing scheme has three potential components: reducing congestion, raising money, and easing emissions. London’s scheme, which does a very modest job of raising money was designed to reduce congestion and emissions – and measurably succeeds at that. The Singapore and Stockholm schemes were similarly designed. The Mayor’s Commission’s recommendation of tolling a couple Toronto arterials is biased toward raising money. This will delay its acceptance. Indeed, if it does not noticeably ease congestion, it will never be accepted.

A further problem will occur with tolling these two roadways. Each has parallel secondary roadways that will be subjected to more traffic from toll evaders (just 5% off the highways is a lot for these secondary roads). Some of these traverse neighbourhoods, which has implications for safety, local pollution, and property values. While this may only affect local acceptability, it is still unfair.

Tolling needs to be graduated and wider-spread rather than in a few corridors or in a small cordon.

A congestion-pricing program has to be, and be perceived as being, socially beneficial, not just a correction for a financial problem. Rather than road pricing, it would be better if the Mayor of Toronto saw and promoted congestion pricing as does San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom, who said in his inaugural address on January 8, 2008: "A sensible congestion pricing plan is the single greatest step we can take to protect our environment and improve our quality of life."

2. We will argue over why to do it.

Because of the recent report from a commission charged by the Mayor with making recommendations regarding Toronto’s fiscal dilemma, the current motivation is access to funds. In the past both congestion and emissions have been the drivers of the Toronto debate. While it is nice to have three good reasons for a congestion-pricing program – and Toronto does – each reason on its own has other solutions. Congestion pricing is best designed to address all three. If you stress only funding there are other ways to raise money and the argument that “we are picking on drivers” can be made and requires a long-winded argument to diffuse it. If you stress only emissions, it is possible to argue that cleaner engines are starting to come on line, and that governments should pressure automobile manufacturers and rely on innovation. If you stress only congestion, demands for improvement to our deteriorating transit system will be made in its stead.

The truth is we pay for road use the wrong way. Fuel taxes are losing their ability to fund roads in the face of more efficient engines, they are weak in addressing emissions, especially in North America, and they are completely silent about congestion.

We need to move away from fuel taxes and toward pay-for-use. This means that tolling needs to be graduated and wide-spread rather than in a few corridors or in a small cordon. Road pricing should become the new fuel tax, not remain as a surcharge. The Mayor of Toronto is right in theory that the province should take the lead, but he should move forward anyway. If he did what he could the province would have to follow his lead. The Ontario Minister, while right about the original mandate of his stewardship of the 400-series roads, needs to start looking to guidance from the Feds who do encourage the application of pricing programs. The mid-twentieth century era of Big Free Roads in North America has played out long ago.

3. We will argue over how to do it.

We are on the cusp of a dramatic technology change. There will be advocates for the older, more familiar short-range radio technology (the kind used on the 407, the only tolled highway in Ontario) and yet other advocates for the newer and more flexible technology based on GPS. The older technology while limited is adequate for tolling the DVP and the Gardiner, but it is hyper-expensive for tolling a central business district. This and the inconvenient urban-clutter of gantries in the downtown core is why the New York proposal to blanket Manhattan in 340 E ZPass gantries was rejected in favour of a simpler, but less comprehensive system.

If Toronto were to toll the DVP and Gardiner and no other roadway or cordon, then Toronto could simply extend what is being used on the 407. But most planners realize that the jig is up on free road access. They know that whatever Toronto does with road pricing, it will only be the beginning. For this reason, the newer infrastructure-free, GPS technology should be used. It will allow gradual pricing by distance throughout Toronto and eventually North America so that the financial burden is fairly spread, so that traffic is reduced rather than re-routed, so that prices can be set to offset emissions and so that pay-per-use can gradually supplant the fuel tax.

The Netherlands believes that GPS technology is ready and intends to deploy it countrywide over the next 8 years. It would be wise to follow that lead rather than London’s (look where that took Mayor Bloomberg).

4. We will argue that it harms the poor.

Many argue that road pricing harms those with lower incomes. But advocating a policy of unfettered road access is actually detrimental to low-income earners. Lower-income commuters are generally captives of transit – often buses. These buses are delayed in traffic that is generated more by motorists of middle to higher incomes than by transit users. According to Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute (a world-leading transport think-tank based in British Columbia): "In virtually every congestion pricing project analyzed, low-income people represent a very small portion of total users. When revenues are spent to improve transit services or in other ways to help lower-income people, congestion pricing is almost certainly progressive."

Professor Harry Kitchen makes the identical point in his essential but much maligned, January 2008 report, Financing Public Transit and Transportation in the Greater Toronto Area and Hamilton “...if some of the road pricing revenues are used to subsidize public transit, the poor will benefit because they use public transit much more than the rich.”

New York City's recent Kheel report, suggests combining congestion charging with free public transit for New York City. In Toronto, public transport is not only underfunded, it is overpriced and there is no accounting for distance travelled making short trips overpriced – especially for people of lower income who may not have a vehicle for short distances nor the money to pay for parking. Money to improve transit and to lower fares would be of dramatic value to those with lower incomes as well as to our environment.

Unfortunately, there is another terrible bit of social logic afoot in the myth that road-pricing automatically harms the poor. Most us agree that human activity is harming the planet. We also generally agree that the transportation sector is a major contributor in that harm. In turn, we have singled out the single-occupant vehicle commuting to work daily as the single most offensive component of that. Finally, we argue that with proper pricing signals we could have a significant portion of commuters choose a different modality. Given all that, some then make the argument that road-pricing should be avoided to prevent (unsubstantiated) harm to the poor. This implies that we should choose between poverty and our planet.

Why not raise the minimum wage rather than eschew market pricing of our roads. To do otherwise this unfounded logic would keep poverty and congestion locked in together. There is not a lot of difference between how we treat our planet and how we treat our fellow humans.

5. We will argue that it is not environmentally friendly.

Because most congestion schemes are proposed as cordons around central business districts or, worse, proposed as tolls on selected arterial segments, many people warn that a significant portion of vehicles will simply use other streets, moving emissions to another place, and generating parking problems including idling and circling at the cordon boundaries. While these effects do occur they are not necessarily as bad as their worst predictions. But there is enough truth to this to look closely at it for Toronto. If the DVP were tolled, what would happen on Don Mills or Victoria Park or Yonge Street? If this were modeled it would raise questions, and that, in turn, would reduce the likelihood of acceptance for such a tolling program.

Why not, instead, consider Nobel winner William Vickrey’s advice to avoid sharp pricing shoulders – charging something significant on one road and nothing on the next – if we believe that will risk harm to the neighborhoods along the free road? Why not toll more broadly and more gradually, since the technology to do that is now available and can be deployed at a far lower cost of ownership than current technology?

What if we tolled a central business district at $0.30/km, a wider area at $0.15/km, and a wider area still at $0.07, etc., we’d have no abrupt boundaries. Short trips would be quite affordable – perhaps little more than a dollar. Longer trips from Pickering to Mississauga would cost more – $9 at 15 cents/km. And there is no reason to have a simple tiered scheme like that, because the CBD of Mississauga could be priced higher that the comparably lower price of the less congested area in between it and Toronto. Basically, Southern Ontario could rebate the fuel tax and deploy end-to end congestion pricing with relative pricing peaks in all densely populated areas and times.

The important issue is to turn back congestion by shifting travel times and modalities and without spilling it into new places – a problem that is prone to occur with many current schemes.

6. We will argue that it is unsafe.

There are studies that demonstrate that tolling increases accidents and accident severity. One released in November 2007 by Peter Swan and Michael Belzer makes the case readily: Depending how toll rates are set it is possible to “introduce substantial inefficiencies in the overall road transportation network and actually increase congestion and safety hazards in other parts of the system...” Swan and Belzer “showed that as the [Ohio] Turnpike toll increased, truck traffic increased on alternate, free routes as truckers balanced the monetary savings with the cost of the extra time needed to take an indirect route.

It has several times be argued in Toronto that tolls on limited access roadways such as the DVP will cause some traffic to be deflected. The argument is reasonable. Surely, each additional vehicle added to city roads and streets adds both environment and safety risks. So while not quantified for any Toronto circumstance one can imagine that some Toronto streets may be less safe if tolling were instituted on nearby roads.

Again the solution is easy: toll modestly, toll gradually, and toll the entire network, not just a few segments or a ring-road around Toronto. New liability-critical and privacy-assured GPS technology can do this already.

7. We will argue that we already pay too many taxes.

No one wants to pay more taxes. And very few of us think we pay too little. But we are paying the wrong taxes. Fuel taxes are insensitive to congestion, only a charge related to the level of congestion, or a time, distance and place charge can address that.

Mary Peters, US Secretary of Transport says it best in January 2008: “It is a virtual economic certainty that congestion and system unreliability will worsen if we continue to rely on a tax-based financing system that has little or nothing to do with the true costs of using or providing transportation infrastructure. Today, a fundamentally new transportation policy must focus on system performance…”

The only way we can make the requisite tax shift from fuel consumption to road use is to take those steps necessary to toll everywhere and, at first, to find tax rebate or payment exclusion methods until such time that the fuel tax and or other regressive automotive taxes can be replaced.

8. We will argue that transit is not ready.

It is almost certain that if we took ten or 15 percent of peak-hour cars off of Toronto’s roads and a large portion of those commuters decided to use peak-hour transit that our transit system would strain and possibly fail us. However, we can add buses and train cars prior to the onset of a tolling program. London and Stockholm did this and did it successfully.

One of the effects of more buses and less cars is that buses arrive more frequently, and they get to their destinations more quickly. So what was a dreaded bus commute before becomes more attractive after. Note, as well, that transit demographics predicts that this generally benefits those with lower incomes who had previously been using the less-frequent and slower buses, or the less frequent and more crowded trains. Not only can transit easily be made ready, but the result benefits both the tolled (faster journeys) and the transit users (faster journeys). Since this correlates with income, a properly designed congestion-pricing program benefits both high and low income earners.

And there are many modalities besides peak-hour transit, including time shifting, telework, car pooling, biking, walking, and, for some, moving closer.

9. We will argue that it is too expensive to implement.

The minority that understand that Toronto really does need to solve its financial woes and who also understand that we currently underpay for gas often suggest that tolling is terribly complex and expensive. They suggest that if we must raise more money, just raise gas taxes. If it were not the case that congestion is largely unaddressed by fuel tax, I would agree.

Some may note that London and Stockholm spent $600M and $300M, respectively to set up their programs and that they each spend about 40% of their revenues on operations. If Toronto were to spend that much for the sole purpose of raising funds I think we should all complain. I will. London and Stockholm were less concerned about the optics of cost because both cities were squarely addressing congestion. If that were our only agenda, just breaking-even would work well enough. But it is not our only agenda. In fact, the most recent recommendation in front of the Mayor is to raise money and the roads recommended for tolling are simply the handiest to meter with current technology. That puts the debate on a bad footing from the start.

This is one of the problems with being unclear about whether we are being green, addressing congestion or raising money. Congestion pricing should be primarily about congestion cessation. It should be designed primarily to maximize congestion reduction (which can be automatically aligned with reducing emissions) and only secondarily to raise revenue. Obviously, to be careless about the financial aspects of the system would be a dereliction of duties, so we’ll need to maximize retained revenues – which we can do by minimizing both capital and operating expenses.

The new generation of tolling technology does that. The current generation does not.

10. We will argue that our city is different.

We will argue that our congestion is not nearly as bad as is London’s so that we should not copy that. We will point out that we are not a peninsular island as is Stockholm, so that we cannot copy that. We will observe that our natural democratic entitlements are different from those in Singapore, and that we cannot copy their approach.

That’s all true. And we shouldn’t copy any of them.

Until federal and state/provincial governments address congestion management from a fuel-tax reform perspective, each city must find it own way. Fortunately, there is a way to spread tolls gradually and fairly, to introduce new transit at the outset, to save the poor from financial harm, to address congestion and emissions while raising funds for better roads and transit, to protect motorists’ privacy, and to minimize system costs. A dozen companies worldwide, including at least one here in Canada, are developing the next-generation technology that enables these progressive policies.

In the end, Toronto – or the Greater Toronto Area – will have to find its own way, but hopefully with the understanding, guidance and collaboration from the Province of Ontario.

Bern Grush, Chief Scientist, Skymeter Corporation
February 2008

Here is an earlier blog that is worth reading.

Do traffic lights cause congestion?

Several months ago I listened to a traffic engineer being ignored at a Toronto City Hall public hearing as he described his idea to replace stop signs with yield signs and traffic signals with roundabouts to reduce emissions (he was right).

I have often heard the argument that traffic lights cause congestion. Martin Cassini is an anti-traffic-light person (so am I in my usual well-tempered way), but his argument that traffic control is a primary cause of congestion, rather than just another exacerbator, is exaggerated.

There are lots of contributors to congestion. The congestion-blind fuel tax architecture which perverts the pricing model is arguably primary as is wealth. Traffic lights cause local clotting and may cause unnecessary emissions. I say MAY because traffic signals when properly set up (which is decidedly difficult and seldom the case), can also act as gating mechanisms to let downstream traffic clear before sending in another blob of traffic. In rural areas and smaller towns and off peak hours in urban fringes red lights should be set to flashing amber all directions and motorists who generally wish to remain alive, or at least not damage their automobile, will slow to navigate these simple obstacles efficiently and safely.

The Soul of the Commuter

Back in April of this year, Nick Paumgarten wrote a very sobering essay about commuting for the New Yorker: "There and Back Again". It just won a Sidney Award.

But this essay is a walk in the woods compared to Jane Jacobs' 2004 "Dark Age Ahead" or James Howard Kunstler's 1993, "The Geography of Nowhere". Talking about America, he writes:

"The suburban streets of almost all postwar housing developments were designed so that a car can comfortably maneuver at fifty miles per hour -- no matter what the legal speed limit is. The width and curb ratios are set in stone by traffic engineers who wanted to create streets so ultrasafe (for motorists) that any moron could drive them without wrecking his car. This is a good example of the folly of professional overspecialization. The traffic engineer is not concerned about the pedestrians. His mission is to make sure that wheeled vehicles are happy. What he deems to be ultrasafe for motorists can be dangerous for pedestrians who share the street with cars. Anybody knows a child of eight walking home from school at three o'clock in the afternoon uses a street differently than a forty-six-year-old carpet cleaner in a panel truck."

[Thank you to Leon and Barry]