John--
Two questions
(1)  Have local planners looked into using congestion pricing to limit the volume of peak-hour traffic on the M-25?
(2)  Many goods have high capital costs and low operating costs.  Why is that a special problem for transportation?  Couldn't transit agencies employ a monthly pass with low or near zero per trip costs?


Dr. Gerard Mildner
Dept. of Urban Studies & Planning
Portland State University
PO Box 751
Portland, Oregon  97207-0751
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(503)725-5175
(503)725-8770 fax


>>> John Brooks <[log in to unmask]> - 10/30/98 5:52 AM >>>
In message <[log in to unmask]
>, Colin Leech <[log in to unmask]> writes
...
>"Number of kilometres travelled" does not necessarily equate to
>"Mobility"!!!
>
>Just because people are driving (or travelling by other modes) more km every
>year does not mean that they have benefitted from this increased amount of
>travel. Indeed, it is easy to enumerate situations in which an increased
>amount of travel is actually a negative benefit: more time spent commuting,
>for example, thus degrading the quality of life instead of improving it.

This is the tip of a major question that transport planners seem happy
to ignore.  Essentially, if a planner determines an 'economic
justification' for building or improving a route (especially a road) and
the road gets built, then there is an inevitable traffic GROWTH due to
ADDITIONAL travellers.  They formerly decided that particular journeys
were infeasible or uneconomic but  the new facility changes this
decision and the journeys increase.  This is particularly evident in the
case of the M25 orbital motorway around London, UK.  Almost as soon as
it was finished, long-haul commuting around it became commonplace, to
the detriment of the environment and ultimately to the usability of the
road itself.  It is now the most congested motorway in Europe (?)
despite much of it having been widened from 3 to 4 lanes.

This is a separate argument from the issue of the imbalance between
costs of travel by public transport and private car (once the car has
been purchased and taxed, the marginal cost of an 'extra' journey is
tiny compared with the lowest viable price for a train or bus ticket.

I sometimes wonder why transport economists bother with other, more
detailed questions when there are no practical, politically acceptable
solutions to either of these issues.
-- 
John Brooks



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