Road congestion: the stark reality

A type of road user charging already exists in many places in Australia - tolls for the use of bridges, tunnels, and motorways. Most of these are point payment tolls. If you use the facility, you go through a toll point and pay. However, rather like the excise taxes on fuel, this is a blunt instrument. It doesn’t matter when you use the facility, or, in the case of the motorways, how far you travel, you pay the same.

To reduce congestion, however, we need to think about charging people according to when they want to drive (because roads are much more heavily congested at 8am than they are at 10am or 5am); where they want to drive (driving into the city at 8am is much more congested than driving into the bush at 8am); and how far they want to drive, because the further we travel in congested conditions, the more we contribute to the congestion.

One way in which congestion levels could be managed and prevented from getting too far out of hand is to introduce Time-Distance-Place charging, meaning that each driver is charged according to the time of day at which they drive, the distance they drive, and where they are driving.

We have the technology to make this possible. This type of charging would be very similar to what we already do in paying for mobile telephone calls - we pay different rates for peak and off-peak, we pay for how long we are on the phone, and we pay different rates according to where we are.

If this type of payment system was introduced for using roads throughout Australian urban areas, we might be able to prevent congestion from getting too severe like it has already in other cities of the world and we might find it possible to manage the use of our roads so that we got more out of the capacity of the system.

There are some other conditions that must go along with this. Before such a system is introduced, those who don’t want or cannot afford to spend the money to travel at certain times by car must have reasonable alternatives. That means spending substantial money on upgrading, improving, and expanding public transport systems.

Second, we need to treat this as a system that replaces some existing charges. While it is probably not possible to make such a system revenue neutral, (because it will cost something to collect the charges, and we are trying to change people’s behaviour, so making it revenue neutral probably defeats that purpose), we should probably only introduce such a system in conjunction with removing most or all of fuel excise taxes, and registration charges.

It is also probably necessary to do something else that Australia has been reluctant to do, which is to require that the revenue be spent on improving the transport system and to provide more options for those who do not wish to spend the money to use their cars.

It is also clear that such a charging scheme should be only one part of a set of strategies that should be used to try to reduce or manage congestion. What those other strategies are is the subject for another article. For this article, suffice it to say that road user charging should not be considered as a single policy that will, on its own, reduce or eliminate congestion. It will not do so, and applied on its own, could actually be quite damaging.