Harry Clarke

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, [...]

It is obvious that state governments in Australia are fearful of pricing road use. This is so even though it is almost universally acknowledged that such policies make sense in terms of generating efficiency gains through reduced congestion and more effective use of roads by heavy vehicles.  The backlash that the Brumby Government received from [...]

 I will be speaking in Melbourne on Transport Taxes and Congestion Pricing at the Transport Economics Forum at 5 PM Thursday 27 August – Reserve Bank Function Room.

The paper I co-wrote with Dr. David Prentice on “A Conceptual Framework for the Reform of Taxes Related to Roads and Transport” for Australia’s Future Tax System Review was released today. Comments are welcome.

One of the pretty results of road supply theory is that if you add extra links to a road network you can make everyone on the network worse off.  Equivalently closing down links can improve all traffic flows.  JB pointed me to this nice exposition.  It is called the Braess paradox and its a well [...]

Here is a seminar I gave at La Trobe University on road tax reform.  Comments, questions, outrageously over-the-top praise and emphatic disagreements very welcome.

Here are some libertarian ideas on privatising roads. Roads would be ‘privatised’ like ‘bubblegum’ and ‘beer’ according to the author.  It is difficult to understand how network externality effects would be catered for or how the local monopoly aspects of having what would inevitably – given the subadditivity of the costs – one supplier connecting many nodes.  [...]

The system by which roads are provided in Australia is in a mess.  Roads are funded from revenues collected from fuel excises in the most part by the Commonwealth which builds some roads. Most roads however are provided by local government (which gets funds from the Commonwealth, from local taxes and from parking fines) and [...]

The implementation plan for Kevin Rudd’s $43b already-announced broadband plan is now to begin.  This is to now determine how the project will be built, financed and operated. I guess better-late-than-never. Ziggy Switkowski is rumored to be a candidate for the chief honcho position.  I assume Ziggy’s enthusiastic endorsement of this project will help him [...]