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Every working day, cities in the Western world run the risk of gridlock.
Gridlock happens when traffic in the city centre grinds to a halt and the
jam sets solid. This is not a theoretical fancy of traffic engineers. It
has happened.

In December 1987, a closed underpass near London’s Blackfriars Bridge,
coupled with a larger than normal number of accidents, caused the centre
of the city to snarl up for seven hours. The jam spread at a walking pace
until traffic was at a standstill for 2 kilometres along the north bank
of the River Thames, from Blackfriars Bridge to Westminster Bridge. Eleven
months later, a student demonstration blocked Westminster Bridge and again
the centre of London was paralysed. In July 1989, strikes on the railways
brought twice as many cars as usual into the centre of the city and London
seized up for five hours. On the Thames embankment the Queen sat trapped
in her Rolls-Royce and a party of German tourists paid pounds sterling
11 to travel about 200 metres.

Even Los Angeles, which is not short of freeways, suffers gridlock.
On 29 October 1986, a single accident on the San Diego freeway caused a
jam that lasted eight hours and involved tens of thousands of motorists.
In subsequent snarl-ups over the next 12 months several frustrated motorists
shot drivers who got in their way.

Gridlock is the extreme version of the daily grind of traffic congestion
that bedevils every Western city, except Venice. One way of reducing the
jams is to charge motorists extra when they drive in congested city streets.
The technique is known as road pricing.

The practice started in Singapore in 1975. At the same time the government
introduced higher taxes on vehicles and increased the cost of parking in
the city. Those motorists who wanted to drive into the centre of Singapore
in the morning rush hour had to buy and display a special supplementary
licence, which now costs rather more than Pounds sterling 1 a day.

Generally the scheme seems to have worked. Immediately after supplementary
licensing was introduced, 1 in 10 motorists gave up driving to work in the
city centre and took the bus, the number of accidents fell by a quarter
and air pollution was not as bad as it had been. A report by the OECD in
1988 stated that by 1983, the number of bus commuters in Singapore had doubled.
Fewer than one in four of all commuters were driving to work instead of
one in two just eight years before, estimated the report.

One of the chief objections to this method of road pricing has been
that it is cumbersome and bureaucratic. But modern electronics undermine
this objection. In the last few months a handful of cities have introduced
road pricing and Singapore, too, is about to go electronic.

The problem of traffic congestion is simply stated. InEurope the explosion
in the number of cars is a postwarphenomenon. The street pattern of cities
was mostly laiddown when people walked or took the bus. In London the traffic
congestion is caused by only 15 per cent of thecommuters who choose to drive
to work. The rest commute, mostly by train.

In a MORI survey of Britain’s drivers last year, carried out for the
garage firm Lex Service, 8 out of 10 drivers said they never travelled to
work by public transport. But 4 out of 10 said they would use their car
less if public transport were better. Road pricing is the sword that could
cut the Gordian knot.

Phil Goodwin, the director of the transport studies unitat the University
of Oxford, points to the benefits that canbe gained from road pricing. He
argues that the reduction of traffic would create ‘elbow room’ to improve
the environment for people in cities, by giving over streets to pedestrians,creating
cycle routes or speeding up buses. The profits could be fed back into improving
public transport, building new railways or cutting fares. According to Goodwin,
road pricing is the only way of improving city environments without vast
public expenditure and very tight restrictions on traffic, such as banning
cars from whole areas.

Cambridge could well be the first city in Britain to have road pricing.
Both the Conservative-controlled county council and the Labour-controlled
city council support the plan. Congestion in Cambridge is not bad by London
standards but in the past 10 years traffic on roads leading to the centre
of Cambridge has increased by half-and it is expected to rise by nearly
as much again by the end of the century. According to county surveyor Brian
Oldridge, the congestion is uneven. He says it varies from day to day, by
season, and by place. In the morning rush hour roads leading to the centre
are clogged: the outbound lanes are free-flowing. Oldridge says it would
be unfair to penalise the motorists leaving the city, who are not adding
to the city’s congestion problems. So he and his traffic planners have come
up with an unusual way of solving the city’s hold-ups.

In most road pricing schemes, such as the one in Singapore, motorists
pay to keep roads free of congestion; in Cambridge, motorists would pay
for causing congestion. Each car that travels into the centre of Cambridge
will have a meter. Roadside beacons would automatically switch on the meter
when the car enters Cambridge, and switch it off again as the car leaves.
This would ensure that Cambridge motorists do not get charged when they
are stuck in traffic jams outside the city. While the car was in free flowing
traffic the meter would not register a charge. However, when the vehicle
hit congestion, the meter would start to clock up the charge for as long
as the motorist was stationary. The threshold for charging has not yet been
decided but it could be four stops in 500 metres.

The meter would be kept in credit by feeding it with prepaid electronic
cards, similar to the telephone card. If an imprudent motorist ran out of
credit the car would not be cut off immediately. The meter would continue
to clock up the charges until the car stopped. When the engine was switched
off longer than 30 seconds, say, the car would become immovable. The debt
would be automatically debited when a new card was inserted in the meter.
To fears that the city centre might become clogged with immobilised cars,
Oldridge argues that motorists tend to avoid running out of petrol and would
similarly tend to ensure that they had enough credit on their meters.

The University of Newcastle upon Tyne, supported by the Science and
Engineering Research Council, is helping Cambridge develop the system. The
university’s transport group also belongs to a European team of researchers
developing an automated system for collecting fees on toll roads more quickly.
This is part of the European Commission’s DRIVE research programme.

Peter Hills, professor of transport at the University of Newcastle upon
Tyne, expects a prototype of the Cambridge system to be ready for testing
in 18 months’ time. Motorists are likely to have to start paying for driving
in the centre of the city in 1996-if the city wins parliamentary approval
for its scheme. For although a bill is currently passing through parliament
that will enable private concerns to build motorways and charge tolls, it
will not allow public authorities to do the same for their highways.

In the early 1980s, Britain led the world in the technology of road
pricing. The first electronic system to be tested, which was developed at
the government’s Transport and Road Research Laboratory (TRRL), was set
up in Hong Kong. Roadside beacons transmitting microwaves were able to identify
individual vehicles fitted with transponders as motorists drove around the
colony; the information was passed to a central computer that charged motorists
on the basis of where they had been, with some zones more costly than others.
A remote control camera recorded cars not fitted with transponders.

At the end of each month motorists received an itemised bill, rather
like a telephone bill. The scheme was tested from 1983 to 1985, but was
shelved because of political opposition, partly because of worries about
civil liberties. Ian Catling, an independent consultant who was then the
TRRL’s consultant on the project, says the system could not ensure anonymity.
This would not be the case with the latest systems, he says.

Oslo and Bergen introduced road pricing last year, and Trondheim is
about to follow suit. Elsewhere, opposition from motorists has caused governments
to shelve plans. The Netherlands last year abandoned its plans for a country-wide
system of road pricing on motorways. This was due to be introduced in 1992
as part of a broader package of measures to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.
Now the Dutch plan a less ambitious scheme of road pricing for the three
main cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht. Stockholm’s road pricing
plans are currently bogged down in political controversy. Hills says the
Swedish scheme is particularly interesting because the city plans to use
an electronic credit card for road pricing that also acts as a public transport
pass. Motorists decide whether to use their smart card to pay high tolls
or low bus fares.

In Britain, the London Planning Advisory Committee, which coordinates
planning in the capital following the abolition of the Greater London Council,
supports road pricing. The committee drew up a scheme last year based on
a series of zones covering the centre of the city.

With a toll of 50p for crossing any boundary line, motorists could pay
up to pounds sterling 3 a day for driving in central London. The committee
expected the scheme to reduce traffic in the middle of the city by 35 per
cent, and by 25 per cent on the outskirts. The scheme would cost about pounds
sterling 200 million a year to run, and make a net profit of pounds sterling
300 million-enough to cut bus and tube fares by a third.

Nick Lester, the transport adviser to the Association of London Authorities,
which represents most of the councils in the congested central area of London,
argues that the advantage of electronic road pricing is its flexibility.
The charges for driving in a congested area could be varied from hour to
hour and over quite small areas.

Britain’s Department of Transport is firmly opposed to road pricing
in the capital. At a seminar in January last year, the department acknowledged
that road pricing would be beneficial but it maintained that the problems
in introducing the scheme were insurmountable. In particular, said the department,
London is too complex for road pricing.

Catling describes the department’s view as ‘one of the worst cop-outs
I’ve ever heard’. He says that road pricing could be introduced gradually
in the capital. The most important point is to ensure that revenue raised
from the scheme is used (and is seen to be used) to improve public transport.
This is the way ‘to get car users onto trains,’ he says.

A peculiarly British problem is that the Treasury is opposed on principle
to raising a tax, such as an extra charge on motoring, and devoting the
revenue for a specific purpose, such as improving public transport. The
clearest conflict between road pricing and this principle would occur on
main roads, for which the government is responsible.

Another hindrance to the success of road price schemes is the company
car: there is less incentive for motorists to avoid the extra road costs
of driving in congested areas when their firms pay the bills anyway. This
is a particular problem in London, where surveys have shown more than two-thirds
of cars in central London are subsidised by companies. Catling admits that
company cars are a problem. Singapore gets round the problem by charging
the drivers of company cars twice as much as other motorists.

Despite the attractions of road pricing there is certain to be considerable
opposition. The MORI poll found that motorists would prefer to be banned
from city centres, rather than be charged for using them. About 4 out of
10 motorists opposed the idea of a charge for driving in city centres.

One of the most delicious ironies of the debate about road pricing is
its history.

Critics of the scheme argue that road pricing would restrict their freedom
to drive, and yet a leading pioneer of the theory, who wrote a paper on
the subject in 1961, was none other than Alan Walters, now Sir Alan, economic
adviser to former prime minister Margaret Thatcher and a prominent free
marketeer.

Further reading: Papers from last December’s conference in London, ‘Practical
possiblities for a comprehensive transport policy with and without road
pricing’, can be obtained from the conference organiser, PTRC, Glenthorne
House, Hammersmith London W6 0LG.