Harry Clarke

One of the interesting and influential figures I met recently in Paris was Professor Donald Shoup  from the University of California, Los Angeles - I have a great shot of him iding a (rented) Velib bike near a well-known Parisian tourist attraction.  Shoup is one of the world’s experts on the economics of parking.  This sounds like a [...]

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, [...]

I am attending an OECD meeting on ‘Implementing Congestion Pricing’. There are some excellent papers here – the one by K-K.  Chin on the Singapore experience was particularly good but presentations on the Stockholm, Oslo and proposed Dutch schemes also useful. Generally, the International Transport Forum website is useful for transport planners.
A few of my [...]

Another retrieved post-hacking post. A letter published in AFR on January 16.

The Victorian Government have again acted to close off debate on the possibilities for road pricing in Melbourne. I understand that most politicians are spineless but allowing the debate to develop on this issue while remaining nominally separate from it would not have hurt these politicians much. I presented my views on these [...]

This provocative post by Gary Becker argues that the low taxes on US petrol completely internalise the external costs of petrol consumption in terms of the global warming and foreign oil dependence externalities imposed on the US.  On this basis, Australian excises on petrol – much higher than US excises – would seem to be on [...]

New York politics failed to agree to introduce congestion taxes to deal with traffic congestion. But higher fuel prices are delivering desired outcomes anyway. This is true in New York and, of course, in all major cities along the eastern seaboard of Australia. Fuel tax increases to deal with congestion are generally ill-advised because [...]

Correspondent Conrad referred me to this interesting newspaper account of an academic report on Sydney’s traffic woes. The suggestion is that, without congestion pricing, Sydney would need to construct the equivalent of 14 Lane Cove tunnels annually just to stabilise traffic congestion at current levels.
These claims seem a bit exaggerated. Crippling congestion will itself [...]

My paper, Targeting urban congestion: Equity and second-best issues, has just been published in the Australian Economic Review. Unfortunately the complete paper is firewalled outside the universities. I originally drafted this here on my blog for the Making the Boom Pay Conference in 2006. Comments welcome.

An apparently obvious way of dealing with traffic congestion in a city such as Melbourne is to drive your car to the nearest train station and catch the train to your destination. It is a great theory but the hitch is that parking places near train stations are becoming exhausted and the cost of constructing [...]

In an interview I gave on Friday for the Today Tonight show on traffic congestion I was asked a very standard question. ‘Won’t congestion pricing have particularly adverse effects on low income travellers and mainly benefit the rich?’
I have been asked this question countless times over the years in relation to a various taxes – [...]

This piece from Parapundit discusses an empirical study by Peter Swan and Michael Belzer which suggests that privatising roads can lead to traffic diversions which worsen external costs.
The general argument is one I have commented on before. Pricing on some roads – for example on major highways alone – can lead to traffic diversion onto [...]

I am surprised at the modest impact that the surge in growth in public transport demands in Melbourne has such a low impact on the overall use of car for travel:
‘Census data to be released this month reveals that public transport use has increased only marginally as a share of all trips to work, up [...]

In my earlier work on traffic congestion in Melbourne I was surprised to learn that the intersection between Springvale Road and the Whitehorse Road at Nunawading was judged by sampled RACV members to be the worst traffic-congested part of Melbourne. The interesting thing is that this intersection is a long way from Melbourne’s CBD. It [...]

Ken Livingston, Mayor of London, argues that congested cities should mimic the successful London congestion pricing scheme.
Of course I agree – all the major east coast cities of Australia for a start. In London it reduced congestion, didn’t damage retail sales (the city has just become more livable and convenient), increased use of public [...]

Critics of public transport pricing claim in The Age that public transport fares in Melbourne are ‘too high’ compared to other States – the State-by-State fare comparisons are here.
Indeed this claim at might be true in a comparative sense and from the viewpoint of efficiently pricing such services at social marginal cost – the latter [...]

The Victorian Government in their response to the VCEC Final Report , Making the Right Choices: Options for Managing Transport Congestion, have come down decisively against moves to implement (or even think about implementing) road congestion pricing. I made a submission to VCEC supporting pricing so I am disappointed but not terribly so. I half [...]

Clive Hamilton has a piece on congestion in Sydney and its implications for immigration policy. Responses came from Jason Soon at Catallaxy and Phil at LP.I agree with Hamilton that Australia should be seeking quality immigrants with good moral character and not riff-raff who don’t share our values. I also agree that congestion is a [...]

A tunnel is again being discussed linking CityLink with Melbourne’s Eastern Freeway. The project estimated to cost $10 billion would link the Eastern Freeway in the east of the city to the Tullamarine Freeway, CityLink and Melbourne’s west. An inquiry will be headed by Sir Rod Eddington who runs Victoria’s Major Events Association. The inquiry [...]

In trying to dig out some facts on how Melbourne developed its road system I came across Max Lay’s, Melbourne Miles, The Story of Melbourne’s Roads, Australian Scholarly Publishing 2003.This is not my idea of light reading though Dr Lay obviously loves this stuff. My main finds in this book were parochial. I live north-east [...]