Ryan McLaughlin thinks this is “a fantastic argument in favor of road pricing in Vancouver (a city with more than a few similarities to Stockholm). It’s quite convincing and admirably empirical. ”
In a nutshell:
- Create incentives.
- Don’t plan the details
- People will figure out what to do.
.
I do not claim a great deal of specific geographic knowledge about Stockholm, but as I understand their “road pricing” system, it is actually a cordon price – rather like London. The reason that works is that the centre of the city is still the major focus of employment and hence commuting – and of course both cities have extensive rail based public transport systems. Vancouver does not have either. Employment here has been decentralized to suburban office parks, and the resulting trip pattern is not (in origin-destination terms) many to few but many to many. If we imposed any kind of successful road pricing system, our already overburdened transit would not be adequate to cope with the increased demand. It does not cope with the demand it has now!
London realized that they would need more transit and did not have anything like the time to increase rail capacity, so they relied on buses. They have dedicated bus only lanes – and significantly increased both fleet size and traffic priority measures prior to the introduction of the congestion charge. Even before that happened the mode share in London was very different to Vancouver. 95% of the people in Central London on any weekday got there by train.
London congestion charge is an area pricing (every moving vehicle into the area must pay the congestion toll). the London scheme is often used as a prime example by opponent to pricing, since it is a very expensive system to operate, with social economic gain (due to reduced congestion) unable to justify the cost of the system some argue.
Stockholm rely on a cordon pricing, (every vehicle entering the cordon must pay a congestion toll, but not vehicle circulating inside the cordon).
As the video explain clearly, the entrance inside the cordon is done thru bridges, where congestion occurs.
The system is much cheaper to operate than the London one, since it rely on only 18 electronic toll barriers.
The goal being to reduce congestion. the price level is set adequately and it works well because of that:
* right pricing level…(Important note people not crossing choke point (that is bridges and tunnel) don’t pay toll: so that is only fair!)
* low operating/capital cost of the system…
see http://voony.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/some-toll-economics/ for more detail.
And it is the reason, why I agree with Ryan McLaughlin: Vancouver, has sufficient similarities with Stockholm to adopt the same “low cost” and still very efficient road pricing model.
I think the employment pattern has little thing to do with success of a road pricing scheme rather another one, traffic pattern is, and Vancouver as Stockholm is characterized by choke point (bridges and tunnels)
Deficit of public transportation is always invoked by whiners against road pricing: Let’s be realistic, it will be always people unsatisfied by the transit offer and transit will never be an universal answer. be in London, be in Stockholm,…
However, transit is not a pre-requisite for a successful road pricing scheme
(nowhere the TED talk mention transit by the way), but what is true, is that the better the transit alternative is, the greater the elasticity response to toll is (that is lower toll fare granting congestion reduction):
That is the reason why proceeding of the road toll should be directed to that:
notice the all important semantic difference: toll should not be raised to finance transit per sei, but toll should be aimed at reducing congestion, and finance transit to reduce the toll level)
Fortunately, In Vancouver, it happens that decent transit alternative on main waterway crossing is already existing.
Singapore didn’t have even a subway when it first introduced its road pricing scheme.
I should also mention http://voony.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/congestion-charge-the-case-for-vancouver/
which advocate for a “cordon pricing” as in Stockholm.