Adam Smith Institute

I got shot down on my blog a couple of days ago for supporting road pricing - not because it wasn't fair to make people pay for what they use, but because my readers didn't trust the government not to waste billions on implementing it and keeping personal data safe.

http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com

One expects articles published under the banner of the ASI to be more than thinly veiled sound bites in support of an attempt by the government to screw yet more taxation out of the motorist.

Dr Eammon Butler states that --

"And it's because we pay for roads through a standards 50p-a-litre fuel tax that we all want to drive into town at 8.45am on a Monday – causing traffic chaos for everyone, extra costs for hauliers, not to mention extra noise, pollution and accidents as we stop-start in queues." --

Really -- so I sit in this chaos sniggering that I am able to do it all for the price of 50p a lt.

Dr Butler, you are a fool sir and the ASI should be ashamed for allowing such rubbish to be published under their name.

Personally, I hope this government do press ahead with the scheme because it will almost certainly result in the removal of the party from mainstream government for a long time to come.

However, putting the spin and my disdain for this government to one side for the moment, can an argument be sensibly made for travel taxation in this manner? After all, if you are using the roads then it is reasonable that you should be contributing to their maintenance and development.

The fuel tax is a very direct tax on road usage and vehicle tax can further draw in taxation for vehicles which cause most damage to the road ( such as goods vehicles). So is there a justification for additional taxation to be collected from selected 'caviar' roads?

The answer comes from the fact that the only 'caviar' is that creamed by the government from this sort of imposition on road users.

The first pot of caviar is the huge surveillance scoop that would be provided by this scheme - every vehicle on the road would be monitored everywhere it went. If successful, it would be the step just before every person in the country was required to be chipped for identity and locational monitoring. Forget DNA databases, knowing where every vehicle in the UK is at any moment is a huge surveillance bonus and could well be the primary reason behind the initiative.

The second pot of caviar comes from the fact that motorways do exactly what they were designed to do - move large quantities of traffic quickly and efficiently over large distances. As a consequence, most travellers immediately plan their routes to include as much motorway usage as possible and businesses even plan the location of their operations with view to motorway access. Why? Because motorways are what they were designed to be - efficient and effective.

But the consequence of motorway success has not been allowed for - i.e. when the traffic gets to the end of its motorway trip, it must again return to lesser roads to finish the journey, and these lesser roads have not been upgraded to handle the consequence of the success of the motorways.

So, the proposed solution of congestion in vibrant Cities and successful motorways is -- restrict the flow and milk it for taxation. Yes, that is a really good way to choke off vitality and development while giving the government yet more taxes to squander. Ever heard of 'Killing the goose that laid the golden egg'?

The correct solution to congestion is to look to the causes of congestion and design them out of our systems.

One of the biggest causes of congestion is the school run and its one of the easiest to correct. Put on school mini buses to collect each child either from home or from designated collection centres - i.e. make it easy for parents to get their children too and from school without getting the 4x4 out of the garage.

The next biggest cause is commuters and again solutions are really easy - Stop killing effective public transport and put a tax onto all day public parking while making free parking available outside the congestion area together with a really effective shuttle system, even supporting employers to put on their own shuttle systems for their employees.

The final cause is goods delivery - wonderful - it is a sign of a vibrant business community, when we have cleared the traffic sufficiently, perhaps the goods vehicles will be able to get through on time and without crazy levels of fuel wastage through being stuck in traffic, so they in turn will become more profitable while giving a better and perhaps more competitive service.

Solving congestion is easy if the goal really is to solve congestion. Anything else has to be seen for what it really is - Surveillance and taxation of low hanging fruit.

@Letters From A tory

Presumably you were surprised by the response ???

Can you think why that might be?

If the Government has brought the spectre of road-pricing back, that must be because it still has got to pay its share of the EU defence-inspired Galileo Satellite project. Also the revenue stream for the EU is built on the assumption of road pricing. Other aspects of this debate are second-order to these two top priorities.

"Make better use of public transport", amazing! Does anyone travel outside the London metropolitan area these days? We already pay for the roads, road tax and the duty on fuel, in sum far more than is ever spent on our roads. Outside London, public transport is bad to non existant, and that ain't going to change anytime soon. A lot of the congestion in towns is caused directly by the local councils, deliberately, just as Livingstone did in London to get his congestion charge through. No one has a clue on how to revive public transport, because this all stems from the post war period of "zonal planning", anyone of intelligence at that time could predict the result. Add to that local authority greed and we have problems.

And you think you have a problem? In Venezuela gas is sold at 2p per liter… yes 2p per liter and with this the so called socialist government of hugo chavez transfers about 10% of GDP from those who have nothing to those who have that necessary instrument to collect a part of the income from oil… namely the car.

No. Just no. The implementation of road pricing is not going to be limited to just addressing congestion. It will also entail automated speeding fines, more snooping on our movements, police abuse and really, it's nobody's business but my own where I travel.

I don't have any problem with people being charged for their use of the roads, but we are already severely overcharged for road use by means of VED and fuel taxes. If the government used VED and fuel levies for roads, we'd be awash with road capacity, all of it in good nick. it could also fund a massive increase in cost-effective public transport. The problem is not a shortage of money, or that we're not paying enough for our road usage, it's that the government is pissing the money away on other things.

Endorsing this piffle given the three majority parties we have to choose from to run this country is not going to be seen as an endorsement of paying your way, but as an endorsement of EU-directed snooping on us.

Re Turnpike roads

In the late 18th and early 19th century these roads were a byeword for poor quality at exhorbitant prices. Do we really want to return to that? Two of the reasons that Railways were so quickly popular were the superior travelling conditions and cost.

It's not often that I find myself outraged by something on the ASI website but this total twaddle attempting to defend the patently indefensible has left me both apopletic and amazed. We already pay vast amounts in taxation for that most basic of public services; the provision and maintenance of roads. To suggest that there is any case whatsoever for road pricing is simply to surrender to the anti car lobby and their thinly veiled true motivation; the politics of envy.

The quickest and most effective way to address road congestion would be to reverse the Labour party's deliberate traffic obstruction schemes, their rephasing of traffic lights and their absurd and failed bus priority schemes. All of those would go a long way towards getting traffic moving again and would have the added benefit of reducing expenditure. If you would like to see a proven and effective model of this in action then go and look at what the London Borough of Barnet have done. They have removed a large number of Labour's mindlessly anti car traffic schemes and as a result traffic there now flows considerably more freely.

It is unusual for the ASI to simply accept an unevidenced Government claim and then come out in support of the extra taxation that that claim is used to support. So why have you done so on road pricing as the only cure for traffic congestion?

Dr Butler usefully gives us proof that dangerous academic naivety is not restricted to the left.

"And it's because we pay for roads through a standards 50p-a-litre fuel tax that we all want to drive into town at 8.45am on a Monday..."

Nope, nothing to do with the simple efficiency and desirable social convention of having people working (and learning) together; just a result of fuel tax policy. Presumably if the tax is changed to 56p we'll all suddenly want to pile in at 0913hrs on Saturday.

Having the national road network paid for out of a tax on the fuel of the people who use it is a fine example of a simple system working well despite it conflicting with various favoured idealistic notions (be they economical or environmentalist). Dick with it at your peril. Expect rent-seeking commercialism, increased state control, or a nasty, state-corporatist combination of both if you introduce baroque methods of monitoring and payment.


"The only solution, if we are to curb congestion, is to put the roads into the hands of independent roads trusts - rather like was imagined when the 'road fund tax' on cars was first introduced. Ensure the trust or trusts provide alternatives to those who want to avoid the charge by leaving the car at home. Let them spend revenues on where drivers demonstrate their willingness to pay for access, rather than on what officials think is good for us. Maybe that would restore trust, and get the traffic moving freely at last."

Next week we can work together and cure all known diseases.

Well. In a way the idea is right. We sit in traffic at 8:30 on a Monday because we can afford to. And hence our employers can afford for us to do so.

If we had to pay 10k a year to use congested roads between 8 and 9, employers would quickly get out of this idea that everyone arrives at 9am. Because employees expected to use congested roads at that time to be there for 9 would find new jobs. In order to retain staff, employers would have to sort out flexitime and telecommuting.

The crunch thing -- and the reason this won't work -- is that income tax won't be cut by average of those amounts (delivering a payrise to people working without causing congestion and lessening the impact on those who do). It'll just end up being an additional tax.

We should be campaigning to pin the budget at a fixed percentage of GDP. The government can then change HOW the taxation raises that money, but it can't just arbitrarily introduce new net gains in taxation.

That way "green" taxes or congestion taxes would be a transfer of taxation burden from arbitrary flat-rate taxes into costs on social effects of activities.

Good luck with that though.