Highway congestion is starting to bite. How do we get cars off the road?
Millions of Australians face the daily frustration of delayed commutes, particularly on busy motorways. But as governments spend billions continually upgrading roads, experts say that might not be the best solution.
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Are you willing to do an unpopular solution? Tolls.
Tolls just shift the car population from one road to another. It doesn't keep the car off the road in the first place.
That's true but more an argument why we need more consistent tolling not to mention more congestion pricing.
You can't toll everything. You need to address the root cause, push for working from home and make public transport accessible and cheap. Otherwise you have a bunch of people driving through local south Brisbane thoroughfares because there's no tolls, causing massive congestion.
I'm definitely not against adding more public transport or pushing working from home but that's not really going to help with traffic unless you also control population growth because you'll just have more demand. Look around at other cities the only ones that don't have large amounts of peak hour congestion have tolling arrangements or some sort of car usage restriction.
Could you provide some examples? Demand is demand to get to a destination. If public transport is effectively run and managed, it may be the better option for a lot of people. You are right though, but to ask another question, would you support making those roads smaller with toll monies? I could imagine this ending up with roads only being used by the rich type thing.
Could you provide some examples?
There's plenty examples on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing
Demand is demand to get to a destination. If public transport is effectively run and managed, it may be the better option for a lot of people.
Over a short timeframe yes demand is demand and it's not going to change much but people also move to different areas and a big consideration would be the difficulty and time of the commute. What that ends up meaning is any reducing in demand on an individual road will likely just mean people moving to take advantage of that.
You are right though, but to ask another question, would you support making those roads smaller with toll monies? I could imagine this ending up with roads only being used by the rich type thing.
What's the appeal in making it smaller? I could understand that in the concept of maybe converting some into rail or other public transit infrastructure. Generally I think commuting to work in large CBD by car already has become a "rich type" thing with the cost of parking I think focus should just be more on having good alternatives.
What's the appeal in making it smaller...
You're right, knee jerk reaction more than anything.
If we can get more people to take advantage of good public transport that's always a good thing and congestion pricing seems like a great way to do that. I had never heard of this prior.
Does that even work? Most people aren't sitting in traffic because they want to be there.
Mandate WFH for office workers and most will avoid the traffic by themselves.
Look up induced demand but the tldr is that adding more roads or reducing the cost just encourages more people to travel. Currently a lot of roads you are just paying this in time but this is inefficient as it doesn't encourages car sharing or buses (unless they are given priority). The revenue unlike wasted time in traffic can also be used to improve the road capacity or for public transit alternatives.
That, and local trips. It's not just workers commuting, though that doesn't help. It's local trips too, including people driving to the shops because of poor urban design which mandates car use regardless of whether appropriate. Even if you remove the commute, you may end up with more car use locally
This would work, but it would be better if you had to pay for by the miles on your vehicle rather than tolls on any particular road.
Easiest way to do that would be raise the tax on fuel, but that would be very unpopular.
They’re already looking at implementing a odometer based tax on EVs. They should just implement that for all road registered vehicles and leave the fuel tax as is (or lower).
Adding mass transit, incentives for work-from-home, etc. are all good. Taxing miles driven will reduce miles driven. Just taxing EV miles to make up for lost gas tax revenue probably won't affect miles driven, except for EV drivers. It provides no new reason for GVs to drive less.
Very unpopular for a good reason
