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17 comments on Where Should We Try Congestion Pricing First?

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Valuethinker on December 15, 2006 - 4:19am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
In London, parking costs you £25 per day (but many people get it thrown in by their company)

conversely the congestion charge is £8.

(multiply by 2 to get USD equivalents).

The Congestion Charge has reduced traffic by 10-15%, but more in the off peak than the on peak.

The conclusion?  Those who can afford to drive to work, still drive to work.  Parking was already their biggest bill.

In economic terms, they are highly price inelastic consumers.  The additional cost is offset by the fact that they can get to work faster (lower traffic).

The discouragement has been on voluntary trips, trips by servicemen and builders, trips 'passing through' the centre, shopping trips etc.

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crzwdjk on December 15, 2006 - 11:04am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I've been thinking about it, and congestion charging is seeming to me like not all that great an idea, and definitely not the solution to Manhattan's traffic problem. Well, it all depends on how you define "Manhattan's traffic problem". If you define it as "cars are moving too slowly" then yes, it might help a bit, because the benefit from removing that last 10-15% of cars is relatively high. But if you define the problem as "there are way too many cars in Manhattan", then it's not a very good solution at all: you'll have only a bit fewer cars, but they'll be moving faster. It seems like other,  and possibly better, solutions involve taking street space away from cars, and giving it over to wider sidewalks, bike lanes, and dedicated (and separated) bus and streetcar lanes. Of course, there's no single solution to this problem, and the singleminded focus on congestion charging really isn't helpful.
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Valuethinker on December 17, 2006 - 1:13pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Bingo!

You've hit a nail on the head, I suspect.

Jane Jacobs wrote about this before she died (see 'The Coming Dark Age').  Jane Jacobs, along with Betty Friedan, Rachel Carson, Diane Arbus, Germain Greer and a few others was one of those women who changed the world, a group of women who grew up in the old world, became housewives, mothers, and got dragged willy nilly into changing the world.

New York (and Toronto) owe her a great debt.

Basically roads are traffic generative.  Close a road and  some of the traffic disappears.

We will shilly shally around with 'free market' solutions, which make great sense in terms of the economics I was taught.

And we will then find, that to increase the number of journeys, to get an acceptable throughput of people (and not incidentally to confront global warming) we are going to have to do something really, really radical.

Like ride bicycles.

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