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Our Cities, Our Cars
Why Congestion Pricing? While a city consists of things such as buildings, roads, services, businesses, activities, and its population, its system dynamic is largely informed by the attributes of its transportation systems such as modes, distances, costs, schedules, roads, routes, convenience, comfort and safety. Constant, large-scale, independent movement is critical to commerce, lifestyle, wealth and freedom. But large scale, independent movement also generates congestion and pollution. Technology provides ever cheaper cars and fuel, while road construction and maintenance costs rise. Geography and population distribution provides diminished opportunity for cost-effective asphalt expansion. Urban planning practices and cheap cars have created dense cores and far-flung bedroom communities. Congestion and pollution, the principal products of this positive feedback loop, can no longer be effectively or affordably addressed only by adding more roads or by encouraging people to use transit. Cities like Toronto continue to demand money from the Province or from the Federal Government to subsidize this feedback loop. But the only possible way to stabilize any system with a dominant positive feedback loop is to construct a negative feedback loop as a control mechanism. The best possible outcome of provincial and federal reluctance to fund municipal transport to the levels requested would be to force municipalities into a fundamental reconsideration of transport pricing polices.*
It is now possible to build powerful and effective new levers that enable the optimization of infrastructure utility while minimizing pollution and congestion. City and transportation planners can work more effectively within the physical constraints of existing infrastructure while anticipating growth and development cycles. The art and science of Traffic Demand Management, a body of methods and technologies supported by policies, has as one of its core tenets the understanding that the cost of an automobile journey is not fully borne by the driver or passengers in that automobile. A driver may pay for internal costs (car, fuel, maintenance, insurance), but he pays neither directly nor equitably for other costs such as congestion, pollution or habitat loss. External costs such as these are distributed throughout the population. Worse, because of the inherent cost inequities between private motorists and travelers who opt for any other mode, driving a private automobile is underpriced by an amount variously calculated to be between 30% and 100%. There is a well-developed body of transportation literature supporting or calling for mechanisms to make transportation pricing fair, equitable and economically efficient. [http://www.vtpi.org/] Theoretically, pricing that reduces congestion (displace journeys away from peak periods) and that reduces pollution (move people to alternative modes) implies setting road prices relative to a combination of where a vehicle drives (congested cores), when a car is driven (rush hours) and what is driven (emission volumes). [http://www.vtpi.org/vickrey.htm] Throughout this literature studies indicate that equitable road pricing, in conjunction with similarly managed parking pricing and pay-as-you-drive (PAYD) insurance, would redistribute traffic away from rush hour peaks and would significantly reduce the number of automotive journeys by 10 to 30%. It is generally agreed among traffic experts that as congestion continues to mount and the money and space for more roadways dwindles, electronic road pricing is the only equitable, effective and efficient solution. Although road pricing has a long history, a universal scheme for electronic road pricing has been infeasible until now. The use of fixed infrastructure (gantries) restricts flexibility of both placement and control policies. The widespread deployment of GPS as a metering mechanism requires a broad vision and a standard body of policies − policies that reach beyond a constrained set of roadways, or the financing of a new highway. Even the road-pricing policy for the core of London, UK may be of insufficient scale to motivate the investment in wide adoption of on-board GPS devices as road use meters. Two fundamental components required to create the possibility of fair, equitable and efficient road pricing are now a reality. The first is social and political readiness − the critical recognition that road pricing is the only viable, long-term solution to automotive congestion and pollution (currently this means meeting CO2 reduction commitments with respect to the Kyoto Accord). In the referenced IPPR study, a recommendation is made to deploy electronic road pricing throughout the UK. Other studies have contemplated a similar conclusion for other regions. Several European and Asian cities are experimenting with or have deployed gantry-based city-wide road-pricing and many more are considering it. This shift in policy and social thinking opens the door to investment in broad, standards based technology infrastructure to enable positioning-based automotive trip metering − i.e., every road as a toll road. The second is the convergence of size, speed, cost and capability of a critical set of enabling technologies − GPS, GIS, RFID, SMS and GPRS, as well as appropriate security and privacy mechanisms. If the cost of each on-board device installation can be recovered within a couple of months, an important economic barrier will be breached. To the extent that privacy can be protected, the social barriers are further diminished. If road pricing is the only feasible, global mechanism to manage congestion and pollution and if it now economically, politically and socially possible to deploy road-pricing, we stand at the threshold of a phenomenal opportunity to address three critical urban problems: lack of funding, congestion and pollution. At this point only leadership and investment is missing. How our software addresses this problem.
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