Road pricing
Having spent a fortune on French Autoroutes over the last two weeks the last thing I needed to read when getting back was the Economist urging road pricing on Britain. Nevetheless French autoroutes are very well maintained, and mostly empty, which does rather make one more inclined to the idea.Of course The Economist (and government-ish) isn't proposing simple tolls. It wants pricing which is varied according to congestion, ie at busy times prices will rise and at quiet times it will fall. The London congestion charge already does this in a simple way -- early mornings and late at night it is free, and in the daytime it is not.
So on the face of it it seems a good idea. Allocating scarce resources by first-come, first-served queues is now only really advocated by Tory MPs and party members. Britain's roads are massively congested a peak times.
Nevertheless there are many reasons it probably isn't such a good idea. One, you know the introduction of the scheme will be a disaster. Already the schemes are getting ever more complicated with satellite monitoring and GPS etc, and the cost is bound to exceed estimates by about ten times. Two, presumably there are civil liberties concerns. Three, perhaps Boris Johnson was right on one thing. There are precious few things in British life where poor and rich meet on equal terms, and a traffic jam is one of them. Who hasn't been stuck in a tailback and found some pleasure that Jeremy Clarkson was fuming in a BMW M5 behind you?
posted by Matthew @ 6/13/2005 05:09:00 PM
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