Why NOW must be the moment for road pricing
Clear road ahead to user charging?
Covid has created the perfect conditions to make road pricing a reality.
We must lobby like never before.
“Never let a good crisis go to waste”, as Winston Churchill may once have said.
Opportunity from crisis
Covid has been a disaster for public transport in many respects but it has had the following upsides:
Briefly, in April and May 2020, there was a live demonstrator of the benefits of quiet roads on air pollution. Urban air pollution fell to below 50% of normal levels in those months. People could, literally, taste the difference.
The Government has demonstrated a remarkable radicalism when it comes to active travel measures. The statutory guidance issued by the DfT to in 2020 was breathtaking. I certainly never expected to see a Tory Government issue Statutory Guidance (i.e. legal instructions) to local authorities that said:
Local authorities in areas with high levels of public transport use should take measures to reallocate road space to people walking and cycling
This stimulated a wave of road closures and bollarded bike lanes. While there were protests about these “Low Traffic Neighborhoods” (LTNs) in various local authorities, overall the take-out is that extraordinary and radical anti-car measures didn’t cause the sky to fall in.
3. The public finances have been destroyed. (this is, of course, not a good thing in most respects. But it creates a trigger for radical thinking) The Government is desperate for new sources of revenue and nothing will be off the table in future spending rounds.
So, we have an environment in which air pollution is a higher priority, the Government needs new revenue and anti-car measures are no longer taboo.
These factors join an ecosystem already primed for change.
Taxation burning platform
Indeed, whether deliberately or not, the Labour Government created a burning platform by linking Vehicle Excise Duty to emissions. If the Government sticks to its target of phasing out sale of petrol cars by 2030, VED and fuel tax revenues will collapse within the next decade (leaving a £40bn hole!). So the Government already needed new ways of raising revenue from motorists, and fuel tax is unpopular and penalises rural voters (who tend to vote Tory).
However, there is also a terrible danger. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) pointed out in October 2019,
There is a window of opportunity… before revenue from fuel duties disappears entirely.
If we’re not careful, a tipping point will be reached when so many people have low emission vehicles that “existing taxes are eroded to the point that we have virtually no taxes on motoring at all”. That will make stack the deck against public transport by subsidising driving from general taxation and making any new forms of charges politically toxic as it will not be possible to take away an existing tax in return.
So it is clear that multiple windows of opportunity are open now, but they will close in a matter of years.
An environment open to change
It’s actually remarkable just how open they are right now. A spate of articles in November last year reported that Rishi Sunak was looking seriously at road pricing. Auto Express reported it relatively neutrally; David King of the RAC was positive, CityAM carried an encouraging article. Attitudes look set fair for road pricing.
The Transport Select Committee has just opened an enquiry into the subject. A positive report from such an influential committee could pave the political ground. Submissions to the committee close in just two weeks, on February 17th.
In many ways, it wouldn’t be totally surprising if the pathway to road pricing were smoother than many people think. We got very close back in the mid 2000s. In 2005, the Economist wrote:
Road pricing… replaces a system that rations road use by queuing, which wastes people’s time, with one which rations it according to the value different drivers place on their journeys. And as demand varies, so can price: in cities at rush-hour prices can be set high; at night and in the countryside they can be kept low.
However, the idea was killed off by Tony Blair who caught fright when his newly launched e-petition system on the Downing Street website attracted a petition from a man called Peter Roberts opposing road pricing that attracted 1.8 million signatures. (I subsequently invited Peter Roberts to join me to open the new Haddenham & Thame Parkway station car park).
Strange bedfellows. Head of the Drivers’ Alliance Peter Roberts with me at Haddenham & Thame Parkway to open the station extension
Unfortunately, the perception that road pricing is unpopular was allowed to catch hold, despite the evidence proving that it was not true.
A survey published by the Department for Transport on 'Public attitudes towards road congestion', which was carried out between November 2009 and February 2010, found that over half of adults agreed that the current system of paying for road use should change so that the amount people paid was based on how often, when and where they used the roads. Earlier, a 2007 survey of almost 2,000 adults by Ipsos-Mori found 61% support for road pricing if the revenue was used to improve public transport.
However, the damage was done, and road pricing was ruled out in both the 2010 Labour and Tory manifestos. With a political consensus against, the matter was laid to rest for another decade.
Big brother is always watching you
Technology has come to our aid in the meantime.
Back in the early noughties, fears around “big brother” GPS surveillance were a big part of the opposition that existed. Today, everyone carries a GPS device voluntarily, facial recognition cameras are on most street corners, Alexa listens into our conversations while Google knows everywhere you go.
In such an environment, it is much harder for people to feel that road pricing technology is the first stage to state surveillance.
In 2020, the Covid app also marked a big step forward. The Government asked us to download a piece of state software that monitors where we go and sends us instructions on how to behave. 10 million people downloaded it within weeks, as it was proved that technology can be anonomysed but functional.
If we don’t speak up, who will?
So, we now have a real tipping point moment.
But we must grab it!
And that survey of 2007 is probably still true: people will be much more willing to support road pricing if it benefits public transport.
And yet the world of public transport is deafeningly silent on the subject.
Searches on the websites of the Confederation of Passenger Transport (CPT) and Rail Delivery Group (RDG) both reveal bugger all on this most critical of subjects.
Indeed, when researching this post, I could find almost nothing that talked about the benefits that road pricing would offer to public transport. This is extraordinary. Public transport works best on high-density corridors. These are exactly the corridors that will have the highest charges under a road pricing scheme.
In the absence of the study I couldn’t find, I can’t tell you the details but here’re some fag packet estimates. Government data tells us that there are 351 billion miles driven each year by cars, vans and trucks. We know that the existing motorists’ taxes that need replacing are £40bn and let’s say that we want to create a further £10bn ‘invest in transport’ budget (which we know from research is key to acceptability of a scheme). So a road pricing scheme needs to raise £50bn. That means that the average road user should pay 14p per mile, which doesn’t sound unreasonable.
Let’s assume that 14p per mile is the base price paid by users of ordinary ‘major’ roads. Let’s assume that the 38% of miles driven on local roads (which make up 82% of the network) are less likely to cause congestion, so these journeys will be free (immediately assuaging the concerns of rural voters that road pricing will hammer them: they’ll see a big fall in motoring costs, and rightly so). However, users of the strategic road network (32% of driven mileage on 2% of road mileage) will pay double, while the 10% of mileage that takes place on the 5 most congested roads will pay ten times the base price.
This means that the price per mile for the strategic road network is 28p and a return road journey from Brighton to London will cost £38. A daily commute of 10 miles in the countryside would be free, but on the most congested roads (where public transport should be a real alternative) would cost £7.4k. 82% of roads would be free to use - and the remainder would be fast.
Some example journey prices at 28p per mile for the strategic road network
The reduction in road congestion caused by congestion being properly priced would make bus and coach services properly viable, while the increased prices paid by car users would incentivise use of them.
At a time when a new period of austerity beckons, the entire transport industry should be focused on ways of making public transport sustainable in its own right. Road pricing is a key part of the answer.
Two of my first three guests on The Freewheeling Podcast believe now is the moment for road pricing. Andrew Adonis, transport secretary under the last Labour Government, described road pricing as ‘an idea who’s time has come’. Simon Calder, Travel Editor of the Independent, highlights how this is a way for the industry to go to Government with an ask that isn’t simply money.
I would beg and plead with my friends at both CPT and RDG to join forces and make this campaign a key feature of 2020. Start by properly calculating the benefits road pricing could offer to public transport, and use that to sell ‘free’ improvements to Government. Undertake the research that demonstrates that, just as in 2007, people will support a scheme that seems fair and improves public transport.
There are many people who say that it is politically unacceptable and will never happen. A blog on the Transport Times website makes that argument this week.
But every policy goes through a phase of being unacceptable. Compulsory education of children was incredibly controversial in the 1870s, the NHS was driven through determined opposition and, more recently, Sunday trading, privatised utilities and gay marriage were all incredibly controversial - and are now accepted and normal.
However, it does mean that we need to argue for it. I mean, if we don’t argue for it because we fear that we will not be successful, that fear of failure does become somewhat self-fulfilling.
This isn’t just about grabbing the opportunity of resetting the economics of transport in favour of public transport for the first time in a century. It’s also about mitigating the risk that existing motoring taxes are allowed to lapse without anything replacing them.
Depending on the decisions we make now, and the energy with which we act, public transport will either have a golden century or a failed one.
So let’s have campaigns, lobbying, focus, energy (and some seriously compelling submissions to the Transport Select Committee) now before the door slams shut.
