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Thinking out of the yellow box

16 June 2003

Transport secretary Alastair Darling is thinking the unthinkable on roads. Apparently, that means paying for them. But road-pricing alone won't end congestion - it will just make people even more fed up when they find themselves paying to be stuck in a jam.

The government has woken up to the inexorable rise in road traffic. Its most headline-worthy response is the idea for road pricing, run by a satellite monitoring system that knows where every car has been all of the time. There are also plans for some ten-lane motorways and other bits and pieces to free up space and reduce congestion. Oh, and some brave words about sustainability: public transport, inter-connectivity of services, rail improvements - things like that.

When used in connection to transport the word "sustainable" has more than one connotation. There is a link with sustainable energy policy, since transport uses a lot of energy. This has to do with moving away from non-sustainable (i.e. running out) fossil fuels to renewables such as bio-fuels and electricity. There is also a link to the volume of traffic, in particular the idea that transport "space" is running out, and that there is only a certain volume that the transport infrastructure can sustain. These two links combine virtuously in the name of public transport, with the hope that in this way more people can be transported using less fuel and less space.

Unsustainable, therefore, is code for saying that we are all doing too much travelling. If we go on trying to do more and more it will all end in gridlock and hideous pollution. That's as may be, but the government knows perfectly well that people want to travel more and more. It also knows that people are willing to put up with a surprising amount of inconvenience in order to do so. The "pain" threshold is rather high, and that means that when a new road is build to relieve congestion it will tend to fill up with new journeys until it is congested again. So congestion does control road-usage, but the amount of congestion necessary to deter a driver from driving is, from the policy point of view, unacceptably high.

What about cost? People may be willing to sit stationary in their cars listening to (or inter-acting with) the radio, but is there a limit to the price they will pay for the pleasure of doing so? High petrol prices spark strong reactions (sometimes), but do they limit car usage significantly? Road-pricers had better believe so, since the idea relies upon their being some connection between the way people use their cars and the price of doing so.

Clearly it's not a simple connection. One of the most congested bits of the M25 is the Dartford crossing, which is the only bit you have to pay for. British holiday-makers heading for the Riviera do not abandon the costly French motorways in favour of the adjacent routes nationaux. Getting people to pay for bits of road they're almost bound to use is a good way of making money but hopeless for controlling congestion. An all-road pricing structure is subtler because it encourages people to weigh up the relative value of their journey.

It is true that people will pay the fixed price of something more comfortably than they will pay a price that they suspect could be less. So, if there is both a fast and a slow way of getting from A to B, some people may choose the latter if it happens to be cheaper. Or they may choose to travel at a cheaper time. Differential pricing should, in theory, even out the weight of traffic in such a way that a pricier route remains sufficiently quicker to justify the additional expense. In practice this means shifting the majority of traffic away from the preferred route and time, to achieve which the price differential may have to be startling indeed.

The problem is, however, that in congested situations where more than one route is available, savvy road users have already evened out the congestion between the two. Drivers are adept at finding the undiscovered back way that is three times further but gets there sooner (and traffic planners are adept at putting barriers in their way). In the end, just enough people find the alternative route to balance out the equation and make both equally slow. And people already stagger their journey times to try to miss the congestion, which merely means that the rush hour starts earlier in the morning and continues for longer into the day.

So, drivers are already making choices to make their journey as acceptable to themselves as they can. Differential road-pricing would merely introduce a further variable with which they would have to cope. It may be useful, helping to spread the load of journeys still wider onto empty tarmac. But when it gets beyond the point of changing people's habits into stopping them from doing what they want or need to do it becomes self-defeating.

To help people do what they want to do, you need to know what that is. So what do people want from their transport arrangements? How's this for a first stab.

They want to start from where they are and end up where they want to be
They want to travel in their own space with their own stuff, without having to get too close to people whom they don't know
They want to get there in a reasonable, but above all predictable, period of time.

These criteria for a successful journey don't apply to everybody, but for the A to B brigade - i.e. most people going most places - they won't be far out. And they illustrate why 85% or so of all journeys are made by car, because the first two on the list, at least, are really only achievable in the metal box on wheels that's parked next to the house.

There is an important exception. Commuters don't travel with their families in tow and they don't have much baggage, either. With everybody travelling simultaneously to a similar destination, both congestion and parking when you get there is bound to be a problem. So these daily journeys into and around city centres depend upon an effective mass-transit system. Some journeys are at the margins of this definition and are therefore susceptible to public transport where good services are available, otherwise the car will still be the preferred option.

The concept of personal transport, meaning cars, or motor or pedal bikes, (or even feet, in sufficiently stylish footwear) is intimately related to the notion of prosperity. It is what people want, so long as they can afford it, and if they can't afford it they still want it. The reason is precisely because it is personal, that is "owned" and therefore an identifier for the individual to whom it belongs. It introduces the idea of self-determination, which means that if you have three young children and a load of luggage (not to mention in-journey entertainment) you have an attractive alternative to dragging them/it from front door to bus stop (if any), on/off bus into station, onto platform, into train where you can't find four seats together, etc, etc. All that is avoided, and if you hit a traffic jam you can listen to the radio or turn off down a side road or change you mind completely about where you're going, none of which you can do on a stranded train.

If transport policy is to work it needs to work with, rather than against, the aspirations of travellers, and to acknowledge why people are wedded to their cars. It needs to work out what aspects of them are essential (their practicality) and what merely incidentally pleasant (the roar of the V6 engine), and what of the latter people would give up to improve the former. And it needs to accept the policy limitations of investing in better public transport which, at whatever expense, will only ever shift a low proportion of journeys away from the car.