It’s likely a visible Mobility Decongestion Charge or Tax – call it what you will – isn’t going anywhere any time soon. The NDP, whenever the term comes up, reinforce their position that there will be no road tax – but they’re interested in what the regional mayors and the commission have to say. (“Interested” is a political term in this context. It means ‘we might read the report, but it isn’t going anywhere.’)
All the more reason to be thinking now of less visible ways to price for transportation. Like this.
From Wired:
Traffic Is a Disease. An Uber Tax Is the Cure
Why congestion charging won’t do much to fix gridlock in our cities—and how a traffic tax on Uber and Lyft could get cars moving again.
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Show me a city where Uber has taken off, and I’ll show you a city where congestion has risen in tandem. That’s true even in cities like London …
The problem is that cities’ standard tools won’t work on the likes of Uber. Up until now, economists’ usual response to traffic has been to implement a congestion charge: set a zone where congestion is a problem, and then charge drivers a fee for driving there. …
Uber, however, breaks that model. Uber drivers aren’t using their car as a means of getting from A to B; they’re using it as a means of earning money. … Increasingly, they are the alternative to driving into town—only instead of driving in and then parking, taking themselves off the roadway, they drive in and then just continue driving, for hours and hours, making congestion even worse even as they effectively amortize the cost of any congestion fee. …
What’s more, if you charge Uber drivers, you’re charging some of the lowest earners in the city, people who really need the money they’re making. The tax might be effective, but it would also be regressive. …
What we need instead, then, is a real incentive for the puppetmasters—Uber and Lyft—to free up road space and get cities moving again.
Such an incentive would not need to touch regular car owners at all, and it wouldn’t even require local governments to define congestion zones or times. All those political decisions about who’s in the zone and who’s out, whether bridges are included, what happens at weekends—all of them could be rendered moot. After all, cities no longer need to work out ex ante where the congestion is going to be: Uber and Lyft have that information, in real time.
And so a tax naturally emerges. Every day, or month, or quarter, whatever makes sense, Uber and Lyft would need to make a tax payment to the city government, based on the number of hours its cars spent stuck in traffic. The tax could be quite simple: 10 cents per minute, say, for any time that any car spent traveling below 10 mph on surface streets or 40 mph on highways. Or it could be more complex, involving a sliding scale of higher payments for slower traffic speeds. Importantly, the tax would be paid by the companies—Uber and Lyft—rather than by the drivers. …
Such a tax would create all the best incentives. Uber and Lyft would start charging more for journeys in high-congestion areas or at high-congestion times, reducing demand and therefore reducing traffic. …
One of the big lessons that Uber has learned—and one reason why the company continues to lose money—is that its passengers are very price-sensitive. … If fares were significantly higher for people wanting to journey through a congested area and lower for everybody else, then two things would happen. Firstly, demand for cars would naturally shift in the desired direction. Then, inevitably, supply would too: drivers without passengers would gravitate away from the congested core, towards low-congestion areas which offered a higher likelihood of picking up a fare.
On top of that, the routing algorithms would change as well. Uber and Lyft would have a financial incentive to route cars around high-congestion areas, even if the journeys took a little longer. Meanwhile, people in congested areas who were thinking of ordering an Uber would have a choice: Either pay a bit more and wait a bit longer to get your car, or find alternative means of transportation. That might be unwelcome news to today’s Uber passengers, but it’s exactly the kind of incentive that cities want to provide to their inhabitants. …
Traffic is not a disease.
That is the Achilles heel of the London one time, flat fee. It induces Uber or high use or even maximum use once in the zone. As such, it has to be modified, ie variable.
As such, congestion fees have to be variable, ie per km, or per choke point within a zone: whenever you cross a bridge, or drive along route X or via plaza Y or by monument Z you pay.
1/ Correlation is not causation:
from the financial time:
“According to a study of its data by Inrix, only 6 per cent of Uber trips last year were in central London, during the daytime and on a weekday
[=94% not affected by the congestion charge, how you can conclude that the congestion charge doesn’t work?]…
Less controversial but harder to tame is “white van man”. The number of light goods vehicles is rising sharply, which TfL suspects is because of the tendency for people to have personal parcels delivered to their place of work in central London.”…
2/ Uber and the like reduce the need for parking, and help to build a multi-modal transportation offer (what the above cited study tend to prove).
3/
https://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/166D9/production/_92656819_mediaitem92656818.jpg
Someone please tell the Mayors’ Council and Translink that the congestion tax is going nowhere. Let’s save the money on that commission and all that slick advertising.
It’s time to give it the boot.