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Road pricing offers greater planning potential
If and when a system of road pricing is introduced in Australia its impact as an instrument of social, environmental and infrastructure planning could be far greater than the current licence fees and fuel excise could ever be.
In Britain, where the Transport Secretary, Alistair Darling has announced that he wants to "build political consensus" on using road pricing to tackle traffic congestion, economists and social researchers have begun investigating how to use pricing to manipulate broader change.
Armed with the experience of congestion charging in London and Durham, one UK-based think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research has just completed a study on how else such schemes could be used. It has been looking at combining road pricing with other policy initiatives to combat the "acute economic and social challenges" found in the country's NorthEast.
In fact the institute is urging the government to use the NorthEast as one of the proposed pilot schemes before a nationwide road pricing system is introduced.
The NorthEast is not immediately obvious as a contender for such a trial. Although the region's cities like Newcastle, Sunderland, and Durham suffer pockets of congestion, the institute claims its prime mobility problem is transport-related social exclusion. It says two in five of the region's job seekers complain that lack of transport prevents them finding employment; 31% of people without cars have difficulty getting to local hospitals; and 16% of people without cars have difficulties accessing super-markets.
The institute does not want a road pricing scheme that is revenue neutral but a scheme that generate a large enough cash flow to develop and promote public transport.
"A road-user charging scheme, as part of wider demand management policies, can be a useful tool in combating social exclusion and disadvantage," says the institute's study.
"Such a move can have numerous benefits for the NorthEast - in terms of tackling congestion, traffic growth, harmful emissions and in generating revenue that could be invested in the public transport system."
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US view on pricing
A commentary distributed by the US think tank, the Brookings Institution, has come out firmly in favour of overhauling America's current multi-billion dollar transportation program and replacing it with one structured around road pricing. According to the institute's senior fellow in economic studies, Clifford Winston, road pricing is the only way to combat the country's mobility problems. Mr Clifford says in the last 20 years the annual sum of personal delays caused by US traffic congestion has risen from 700 million hours to 3.5 billion hours. During the same period, the number of people commuting on public transport has dropped from more than 10% to less than 5%. Mr Winston wants to see less general revenue spent on road construction and public transport (because he says public transport causes congestion too) and the whole tangle sorted out through road pricing. "Road pricing reduces congestion without using financial resources," he says. "The only spending required is the modest sums to set up the initial tolling mechanism".
Bike sales
The July terrorist bombs on London's public transport system produced an immediate upsurge in bicycle and scooter sales. The day after the attack one bike retailer reported a 400% increase in customers. Even one month later the Association of Cycle Traders was reporting general sales in London were up 40% to 100% on the previous year.
Crossings out
As part of a general attempt to increase railway safety and security, the US is ordering cost studies on eliminating railway crossings and creating instead "sealed corridors" for rail transport. An initial study is being conducted on commuter rail services out of Los Angeles where there are 49 crossings along 93 kms of track.
Animated traffic
There could be a brand new market opening up for traffic engineering data. Researchers at the Centre for Computational Research at the University of Buffalo in New York State have taken such data and engineered it into a virtual-reality simulation complete with local landmarks and street signs. The result is a software package that allows planners to offer presentations of exactly how a proposed development project will impact neighbourhood traffic. According to the university, the package can also be used by local businesses to see how many potential customers will pass their store on any particular day - and provide lawyers with a state-of-the-art 3D animation of a road crash for presentation to a jury. In fact according to the university, most new computers are so packed with high-powered visualisation programs that most new PCs can run the software.
