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. Continue reading Daft proposals for Melbourne’s transport woes
In commenting on an earlier thread Paul H cited a graphic showing how the Chinese know what the short-run travel times are in a vast city like Beijing. It is apparently based on the (real time) travel times of 10,000 taxis in the city. It provides a guide to instantaneous marginal congestion costs based on information from GPS boxes [...]
In many Australian cities an attempt has been made to regulate levels of parking by controlling levels of on- and off-street parking. The dominant trend has been to heavily restrict on-street parking but to keep that which is available priced at relatively low levels. The resulting excess demands are rationed primarily by restrictions on the length of time that a spot can be occupied and by means of restrictions on the type of vehicle that can be parked such as residency permits. Privately-owned off-street parking has been encouraged as a more higher-priced alternative to on-street parking. A strongly-held policy objective is to discourage long-term parking. Continue reading Parking economics
Road use congestion costs arise because travellers do not consider the impact of their travel decisions on the travel times of other road users. This creates what is the most significant externality associated with road travel. For the UK congestion is estimated by Samsom et al. (2001) to provide between 75-84 per cent of total estimated marginal external road costs. For the US, Parry et al. (2007, p. 384) estimate that congestion costs constitute about 50 per cent of all distance-related externality costs. There are no comparable estimates of the relative importance of congestion costs for Australia but the estimates of absolute size that are available suggest a substantial importance.
The most plausible traffic congestion pricing solutions for Australia involve specific cordon pricing for some of its major cities along with pricing of major arterials and ring roads. Most plausibly these cities would be Sydney and Melbourne. Other cities face high per km congestion costs but have limited aggregate congestion costs that would mean fixed costs of operating cordon pricing schemes would make them at best, only marginally viable. There are serious issues of providing extra public transport infrastructure to encourage modal shifts from the use of private vehicles.
Continue reading Traffic congestion externalities
Recent Comments