Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380-399)
DR DENVIL
COOMBE, PROFESSOR
PETER MACKIE,
DR GREGORY
MARSDEN AND
DR DAVID
METZ
26 JANUARY 2005
Q380 Chairman: Am I to take it you all
agree that road pricing is inevitable or does anybody dissent
from that?
Dr Metz: I would not agree it
is inevitable. The interesting fact, to my mind, is that the average
time people spend travelling has stayed unchanged for about 30
years. People seem to allocate a certain amount of time to travel
and go as far as they can in that time to reach the destinations
that are attractive to them. If you increase capacity, if you
widen the M25, the effect of that is to allow people to go faster.
They then go further. Capacity increasing is a bit counterproductive
in that sense. My view is that although road pricing is certainly
an option to regulate demand, ultimately congestion is self-limiting
because we only have a certain amount of time in the day that
we are prepared to devote to travel.
Q381 Chairman: Are you really saying
that if everything just stops we will have achieved as much as
we would by expanding our roads?
Dr Metz: I think congestion deters
people from making trips. It encourages them to make shorter trips
and shift the times of their trips. In that sense, congestion
is self-limiting. You can on top of that impose road pricing if
you want to reduce congestion below that natural level but I do
not think it is essential. Given the difficulties, which are the
subject of your Committee's inquiry, it may be in the event that
one will not want to adopt a generalised approach to road pricing.
One may prefer to live with the congestion that we live with at
the moment.
Q382 Chairman: Do you think those are
the alternatives: living with what you have or looking for road
pricing as an alternative?
Dr Metz: There may be an alternative
that involves the use of information and telecommunications technologies
to give excellent, high quality information to travellers so that
they can make decisions in advance of their journey with a good
knowledge of the kind of congestion that they might encounter.
If people had that knowledge in advance, they would plan better
their travel arrangements. There might be an overall reduction
in congestion on that account, though that is speculation.
Q383 Chairman: To what extent do you
think the effectiveness of road pricing would be undermined by
people's propensity to travel further?
Dr Metz: I think it could be substantially
undermined. If you open a new toll road, for example, which is
much less congested, that will encourage people to make longer
trips commuting to work, on business or leisure, because those
who can afford to use the toll road will take full advantage of
it. Given that travel time seems to be invariant, what we see
is people finding further destinations to go to that would be
attractive to them that would repay the trip in the time they
are allocating.
Q384 Chairman: Dr Coombe, would you agree
with that?
Dr Coombe: No. First of all, the
proposal to widen the M25 by a limited amount has always been
a recommendation that goes along with road pricing. The two must
go hand in hand, so I agree on that point. I agree also that if
you widen alone you will get longer trips but if you charge on
a per kilometre basis you will get shorter trips. The work I have
done shows that the reduction that you can get through economically
optimum road pricing will far outweigh the increases that you
would get from road building alone. It is a method by which you
can tackle this business of people just using up their time budget.
You can constrain the amount of travel that will take place on
the road system.
Q385 Mrs Ellman: What about the level
of the price of fuel? Does that affect people's travelling?
Professor Mackie: It certainly
does. There are plenty of economic studies, done by your adviser
among several others, on what sort of relationship there is between
fuel prices and the volume of travel. Indeed, it is that sort
of relationship which is used to infer what the relationship of
a more generalised form of road user charging on the volume and
pattern of travel might be.
Q386 Mrs Ellman: It has been suggested
to us by at least one witness that it would be better to have
high fuel costs rather than road pricing. Would you agree with
that?
Professor Mackie: No, I would
not. The current price regime, if you like to put it that way,
the tariff regime of vehicle excise duty and fuel tax, is not
bad at doing some things but it is fundamentally crude. The pattern
of congestion and environmental emissions is very variable across
space and time. The biggest single benefit of a road user charging
system would be a pricing system which better reflected the differential
costs of travel at different times and in different places. I
agree with you that the choice you have articulated is probably
the true choice. It is between going back to the year 2000 and
continuing with the fuel duty escalator versus a more sophisticated,
more variegated type of road user charging. For me, that is the
policy choice compared with the base case of allowing things to
continue broadly on the trajectory they have been for the last
decade or more.
Dr Marsden: There are probably
several other factors that would suggest that in the long term
going back to a continuing escalation of fuel prices would be
a negative thing. We already see disadvantages for rural road
users and I am aware that this government does not like to upset
the rural communities too much. If we look towards the role of
technology in the future, those people who are buying new cars
will be buying cars that are potentially 25% more efficient than
the older, second hand cars. In terms of equity and continuing
with the current system, we would be seeing loads of people holding
older cars and paying more for every kilometre they travel. If
we add to that the fact that, with the improvement in fuel technology,
the Treasury is likely to see a reduction in its income from fuel
duty over the next ten years, in order to make that shortfall
up they will have to increase fuel duty and therefore widen this
potential equity gap yet further. I think there is a number of
arguments for moving away from fuel tax based on equity issues
as well as the concerns that exist over equity with road user
charging.
Q387 Mrs Ellman: If there was to be a
national decision to have road pricing, how do you think that
should be implemented? All at one go or by designating particular
areas?
Dr Marsden: One of the most promising
routes to implementation may well be initially through some sort
of voluntary opt in scheme. If we look at the Norwich Union pay
as you drive insurance system which has now gone live on the market
for young drivers, they already have in-vehicle GPS systems. They
can be charged according to the kilometre for the roads they are
on, by the time of day they are travelling. Norwich Union have
a waiting list of people who would like this insurance product.
They have a fan club, which is most unusual for an insurance company.
Obviously the people who wish to take advantage of this product
are people who believe that they will be able to save themselves
money. There may well be a substantial proportion of small mileage
users or users who do not use congested roads who would also feel
that that they could take advantage of those sorts of gains within
a national road user charge. There may be a section of the market
that would find that quite attractive in the short term. That
could be a proving ground for the technology and acceptability
amongst a proportion of the population. You may then consider
rolling that out through perhaps making it mandatory to have this
system fitted to new vehicles and, over time, if the technology
is there, available in anybody's car.
Dr Coombe: I agree with all that.
I think there are other things that can be done in the shorter
term. The first thing is to encourage the local authorities to
implement congestion charging schemes where congestion is sufficient
to warrant it. That is not always a given but that is what the
government is currently doing with the local authorities. I think
that is the right thing to do. The thing that they are not considering
at the moment, which they should in my view, is a modest motorway
tolling. This only should apply where the motorways are to be
widened.
Q388 Chairman: Do you want to give us
a definition of "modest"?
Dr Coombe: Yes. The level of charge
should be set just to return the traffic flows on the widened
motorways to the pre-improvement levels so you do not get a net
increase on the local roads as you would if you charged on an
unwidened motorway, but you lock in the level of benefits on the
widened sections. The point about that and promoting congestion
charging is that you get the nation used to paying for road use.
Trying to roll out a national system in one go is going to be
hugely complicated and I think it would probably be very difficult
to do.
Q389 Mrs Ellman: You have mentioned local
authorities introducing local congestion charges; yet hardly any
outside of London have done that. Perhaps one. That is extremely
limited. Why is that and what can be done to change it?
Dr Coombe: I am working with one
local authority very closely at the moment. My view is that they
have yet to take into the depths of their consciousness what the
government is offering them: the trade-off between greater control
of buses and the implementation of charging. That is a new idea
to them. Secondly, they have yet to see congestion in many places
rising sufficiently high for them to think about charging and
grappling with all the political difficulties. They need to be
taken through the future, to be shown the future, how difficult
it is going to be, and to have the benefits of having control
over the buses fully explained to them.
Professor Mackie: I would like
to agree that in many cities there are questions about whether
congestion is really bad enough for long enough to justify the
costs of introducing a scheme at this point, certainly a local
scheme, but I would like to add a further consideration which
is that, in my view, many cities perceive themselves as being
in spatial competition with one another. Even strong cities like
Manchester and Leeds will have to consider the possible impact
of road user charging in their areas on their attractiveness relative
to Bradford, Wigan, Liverpool and the next cities in the league
table. Those in turn will need to consider the attractiveness
of their cities relative to the big towns slightly further down
the league table. Without any kind of national or regional policy
which gets around this spatial competition problem and the possible
impact of out of town in a weak planning environment, I think
there will be great reluctance by the city fathers to approve.
Dr Metz: On the question of roll
out, whether at national or local level, one would need to be
quite cautious in particular because there is the problem of the
low income motorist which has to be addressed. These are people
who have to use a car at peak times to get to work because public
transport does not work for them. It is not a problem in central
London of course. There is plenty of public transport. It is not
a problem with a toll road because there is the alternative untolled
road. If we go for any kind of generalised road pricing nationally
or in a particular area, the problem of the low income motorist
is potentially serious. These are motorists who already spend
between £30 and £50 a week on motoring costs. That may
be 25% of household expenditure. They could well find it difficult
to bear the additional cost of congestion charging. Existing analysis
by the Department for Transport and others has given insufficient
weight to this point. In any kind of roll out, one would want
to pilot what was being tried and address very carefully the implications
for those on low incomes.
Q390 Mrs Ellman: It has been suggested
that a charging scheme could be fiscally neutral. Do you think
it is possible to implement that at the level of the low income
motorist?
Dr Metz: It could be fiscally
neutral in aggregate for a whole population but what you would
have to ascertain would be the winners and the losers. If it turned
out that low income motorists were net losers, as they might well
be—I am thinking of people who are locked into shift working
which requires them to go to work at peak times, who cannot use
buses or public transport because they do not go where they need
to go. In the long run, of course, they can change where they
live and work but in the short to medium term that is not feasible.
If significant numbers are going to be seriously out of pocket,
there is a real problem of equity and politics. Further studies
on the applicability of road pricing, whether nationally or locally,
really ought to address this carefully.
Dr Marsden: On the issue of revenue
neutrality, if we have a system which is revenue neutral across
the whole of the UK, that would seem to imply, unless the Department
for Transport has an as yet unknown agreement with the Treasury
that somehow more funds are going to be coming into transport,
that there are no extra funds available for investment to compensate
those people who might need to make journeys by other modes. Without
some form of increase in net income from the charge, it is hard
to see how attractive this will be to a number of cities because
essentially it will amount to a redistribution of how much you
pay across the country with no change in transport spending. Certainly
Peter and Denvil will have other views about the reasons why we
should not adopt a revenue neutral system.
Q391 Mr Stringer: Dr Metz, you said that
the time people spend travelling in this country is a constant.
Professor Glaister has said that the time people spend commuting
and travelling in London is longer than elsewhere in Europe. Is
there something peculiar about English people where we choose
our norm at a longer period of time than people elsewhere?
Dr Metz: One first distinguishes
between total travel time and commuting travel time. Total travel
time varies according to factors like gender and geography. For
example, people who live in London spend more time travelling
than people who live in rural areas. The national average for
Britain's total travel time is about one hour per person per day.
For younger people living in London, it is about 1.4; for older
people living in rural areas, it is about 0.7. Data that the Commission
for Integrated Transport have assembled comparing Britain and
other European countries has focused on commuting time. Our figures
are rather higher but in other countries where total travel time
is looked at you find the same uniformity of total travel time
of about an hour per person per day, regardless of GDP per capita.
It is quite remarkable to find this.
Q392 Mr Stringer: There is a European
standard at which English British people spend more time commuting
than on leisure travel? Is that accurate?
Dr Metz: Yes.
Q393 Mr Stringer: I am not sure how important
that is but it is very interesting. Professor Mackie, in your
evidence, you say that there is a lack of political will or perceived
necessity to face the issue of congestion through pricing but
in your answers to Mrs Ellman you indicate that the problem is
not that bad in most of our cities.
Professor Mackie: I intended to
indicate that the local, political judgment is that, faced with
a local scheme which is going to (a) cost money to implement,
(b) impose certain risks and (c) agreeing with you, a situation
in which perhaps congestion is serious for four hours of the day,
there are questions about the cost-effectiveness as against the
risk of going for it at local level.
Q394 Mr Stringer: By what measure would
you say the congestion in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle
was serious?
Professor Mackie: I would have
a rule of thumb that when you get to, say, speeds being achieved
of 10 or 12 miles an hour congestion is beginning to be serious.
I know most about Leeds and for the radial routes into Leeds city
centre you are talking about those sorts of conditions for three
or four hours a day, Monday to Friday. At that point, congestion
is becoming serious.
Q395 Mr Stringer: It is the speed of
the traffic, not the time it takes you to get from A to B? I realise
these are related factors but they are relatively compact cities.
A commuter journey to the centre of Leeds does not take very long,
does it?
Professor Mackie: It depends where
you are coming from. I have taken a rather city orientated focus
to your question. Clearly, there is a whole different ball game
out there on the motorway network for people making inter-urban
or extra-urban to urban journeys where reliability is a major
factor and where it may not be congestion so much per se
as the uncertainty as to when there will be blockages which prevent
you from accomplishing your journey in anything like the expected
time. That may be the limiting factor.
Q396 Mr Stringer: If you were the Secretary
of State, would you prioritise urban congestion charging or inter-urban
motorway road pricing? What do you think is economically more
important to the country?
Dr Coombe: In my view, it is the
inter-urban network, certainly the motorways, certainly the ones
that are in the government's national priority list at the moment.
The M6, M1 and M25 are now congested for three hour periods, morning
and evening. The inter-peak periods are now so high that within
a few years, certainly less than ten, they will be at today's
peaks. What goes along with the long journey times that then arise
is unreliability. You have to factor in a substantial amount of
the mean journey time that you expect in order to guarantee arriving
at a particular time. One of the great benefits of reducing congestion
will be a greater reduction in unreliability.
Q397 Mr Stringer: Do you think the M6
toll road has been a success?
Dr Coombe: It has been a success
in very limited terms.
Q398 Mr Stringer: Do you think it is
a model for future development of the motorway system?
Dr Coombe: No. Those two questions
deserve different answers. It has been a success in that it has
attracted and taken a substantial volume of traffic, a large part
of which has come off the existing road network. My concern about
all this kind of approach—the M6 Expressway as well—is
that unless you apply some kind of control to the existing road
network you get the opportunity for the relieved conditions to
be taken up by further traffic. I understand from recent counts
that one is beginning to see that effect on the existing M6 in
the west Midlands now. There is more growth than you would naturally
expect because conditions have been relieved. The way forward
on this is to have a tolling system that goes beyond the new road.
That is, you apply a modest level of tolling on the relieved roads
in order to control growth on those roads as well. All this comes
back to the point that Peter made earlier, that there is an optimum
combination of charging and capacity. Therefore, one needs to
be sure that one is not providing too much capacity simply because
it is a convenient way of doing it. I certainly feel that is the
case with the M6 Expressway where the multimodal study argued
for a single lane and it is now looking as though people might
be thinking it is easier to provide an extra two lanes in each
direction. That seems to me to be the wrong thing to do and quite
probably over-providing capacity.
Q399 Mr Stringer: If I can take you back
to urban areas, I think you said earlier that local authorities
had not woken up to the fact that the government were offering
local authorities more control over buses as a trade-off against
some sort of traffic restraint or congestion charging. Can you
comment on that? Does it not strike you as odd that the government
is not dealing with the congestion charge by deregulating buses
as a way of dealing with congestion, rather than using it to centrally
control things locally in the local area?
Dr Coombe: I think there is a
lot of sense in the policy and the way they are linking the two
things together. Certainly local authorities need control over
the public transport system and in many places buses are providing
the public transport system.
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