The Sunday Age today presents a proposed ‘transport revolution’ for Melbourne prepared by Monash University’s Professor Graham Currie – a ‘transport expert’. The plan recognizes that expanding road supply is not a major sensible option in the face of Melbourne’s ballooning congestion problems and instead argues for creating a ‘road hierarchy’ that gives pedestrians, cars, motorists and public transport priority access to roads at different times of the day to improve travel times. To reduce congestion Professor Currie proposes to limit the building of new roads, create the above-mentioned priorities, reduce the speed limits allowed to cars in shopping strip areas during the day and by giving more priority to public transport by, among other things, removing on street parking.
It could be that The Age has misrepresented Professor Currie but, on the face of it, this looks like the most foolish set of proposals I have yet seen put forward to address Melbourne’s congestion – and that is really saying something in Victoria! Many of the proposals –particularly rationing road use to non-car users in the face of expanding travel demands – will worsen congestion dramatically not improve it – by constraining the times cars can make journeys and thereby creating bottlenecks. Rationing plans do not allow high-valued journeys to be undertaken – they try to reduce car use by making congestion worse.
How could a Government shell out hard-earned tax-payer dollars for such advice? My only hope is that The Age have misrepresented Professor Curries’ views.
The only way to manage excessive demands for something whose price of usage has been set at zero is to allow a positive price for road use to develop. Road use needs to be priced as has been argued by countless commentators for more than 50 years. This reduces the excessive demands for road space and allows journeys to be undertaken which do have high value. To be specific suppose your wife is pregnant, her waters have broken and you urgently need to get her to hospital. Under the Currie proposals you will face a more difficult task of getting her to the hospital since, with reduced effective supply, congestion will be worse – with congestion pricing you simply pay the toll and avoid the excesses of congestion. With pricing people making marginal journeys defer or shift to another transport mode – about half of all journeys in a city are discretionary so it is quite easy to cut out 10-15% of demand to eliminate excessive congestion by pricing.
Parking spots shouldn’t be cut but priced properly so that, again, high-valued journeys can be taken. Professor Currie is out of touch with the recent literature on parking - much of this associated with Professor Donald Shoup – which again emphases using economics not heavy-handed prohibitions to manage scarcity.
Transport planning in Victoria is a black hole but this type of nonsense should be buried and a rational rethink of transport issues developed which is based on the science of scarcity – economics . Forget about daft engineering solutions that are usually ineffective – this proposed solution is worse than that since it will make things worse.
If this is for the general public, it would be nice to have an example where congestion pricing works. E.g., “In country XXX, for example, congestion pricing reduced the average journey time for the same distance by YYY”
If it’s not for a general audience, I don’t see why (1) getting rid of on street parking wouldn’t reduce congestion — surely that would (for everyone involved), and (2) I imagine that slow speeds in shopping centres is fairly neutral (a bit like schools zones; and (3) not building more roads is probably true if you consider the opportunity cost (e.g., building some more train tracks instead).
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With a more complicated version of pricing it would be handy to know how many more cars could be on the streets before we would end up in the same situation. It would also be handy to know to what prices you would need to stop congestion — maybe people pretty inelastic to this and basically drive until congestion makes it take much longer.
The London and Stockholm experiences have been favourable.
Be careful – the objective is not to stop car travel – it is to eliminate wasteful congestion and to facilitate getting a parking spot at low cost.
“To be specific suppose your wife is pregnant, her waters have broken and you urgently need to get her to hospital.”
You and your wife can always, under the Currie proposal, go by bus and walk to the hospital from the bus stop.
The ignorance of, and hostility to, pricing as a means of sorting high from low value use – of anything – knows no bounds, whether it be congestion, carbon or coconuts.
In my opinion it seems that the best way to improve our roads and public transport systems is to improve the services offered by these systems to encourage more people to use it. Right now it doesn’t seem that beneficial to build another road to move traffic in and around the city; and even if they do build more roads the majority of them are built for TODAY and not 10 years from now. Example: The Ring Road.
The money spent on a useless road could be better spent on useful new trains for Melbourne’s rail network, and better infrastucture on that network (South Morang extension, dual-line to Hurstbridge, etc.) to make the network much more appealing for people instead of using their cars to get to the city.