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
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 its decision to price EastLink and the fact that the NSW Government refuses to even call the time-of-day pricing it has introduced on the Sydney Harbour Bridge ‘congestion pricing’ suggest a particular lack of spinal strength in our state politicians that will condition our road transport policy possibilities. Continue reading States, local government & transport sector pricing reforms.
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. Continue reading Transport economics forum
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 known [...]
Here is a seminar I gave at La Trobe University on road tax reform. Comments, questions, outrageously over-the-top praise and emphatic [...]
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. I [...]
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 by the states which again gets funds from the Commonwealth but which also collects vehicle registration fees, licence fees, speed fines and taxes on car insurance premiums. Continue reading Markets for Australian Roads?
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 if he is indeed seeking employment. Ziggy does believe that there are legitimate concerns in relation to the returns to taxpayers from their investment - normal commercial returns are unlikely but – and this sounds promising for the Rudd economic illiterates – Ziggy also believes that ‘nation building’, while a valid justification (!), is hard to quantify.’ Onya Ziggy. Continue reading Roads, broadband & Kevin Rudd
Recent Comments