Don’t automatically reward low emission vehicles
If you read the very first post on this blog, you’ll know I’m a big advocate for road pricing.
There are positive reasons for road pricing, but there’s also a ‘negative’ reason: that it avoids the dangerously common mistake of, instead, charging for emissions.
Penalising high emission vehicles sounds so intuitively sensible but it is not.
As an example, let’s look at the latest example, that of Merton Council.
They are rightly trying to reduce air pollution, so have decided to start charging more for residential parking permits for more polluting vehicles.
It’s reported that the most polluting vehicles will pay £540 per year; an increase of £390.
So, why is this a bad idea?
Well, for what will happen, we only need to look at Council Tax. Council Tax bands were set in 1991, with the intention that they’d be regularly reviewed. But, of course, that never happened. The result is that period houses now owned by rich professionals in Brixton still have Council Tax bands reflecting the legacy of riots just 10 years earlier. Once something is set, it is very hard for politicians to change as the winners say nothing but the politicians get hammered by the losers.
That means that the bands Merton creates in 2021 are likely to survive forever.
The problem, of course, is that the most polluting vehicles will gradually be replaced by lower emission vehicles until, eventually, all vehicles are in the least polluting category. As these vehicles are being charged less than the current flat permit charge, this creates a financial incentive to own a car.
Now, this is a problem for a number of reasons: firstly, zero-emission cars are not zero-emission. As per this post, an electric car has a carbon footprint 40% lower than a conventional car, but a lot of carbon is used in both manufacture and scrapping. Battery production uses rare, non-renewable metals. Making parking permits cheaper has precisely the wrong opposite impact of that which is needed: they reduce the cost of ownership, encouraging more people to own their own car as opposed to living car-free and renting from a fleet. Yet the carbon impact of these cars is entirely in start and end of life; meaning that Merton are incentivising the most carbon-intensive car-use model.
And carbon is not the only reason why car use in cities should be discouraged. The fundamental issue is that a sole driver in a car consumes 800% more road space than a bus passenger. There simply isn’t enough room for everyone to drive their own car, even if they were genuinely zero-emission. So we shouldn’t be making ownership of any cars cheaper.
There is also a fairness issue, given that rich folk tend to have driveways whereas poorer people need to use on-street parking - and to be less likely to afford a Tesla. This policy means that someone with a driveway will pay nothing but a poorer person who can’t afford an expensive car will pay full whack.
The final issue with this approach is that it’s pricing the wrong thing. The council justified the policy as follows:
Although Merton is the only borough in London to be served by trains, Trams, Underground and buses, almost half of journeys are made by car and many of these are for very short distances, which could be covered by bike or on foot.
Spot-on! Makes total sense! They’re trying to discourage unnecessary journeys by car. But they’re not pricing journeys, they’re pricing the opposite: they’re putting a price on the time you’re not using the car. By using one-off charges per vehicle, you create the incentive to make as many journeys as possible to maximise the feeling of value for money for the one-off outlay.
No, the reality is that the council are right in their objective: they want to discourage unnecessary journeys on crowded roads. The solution is simple: charge for them.
