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Reported in Local Transport Today In a paper published in Environment and Planning A, M. Echenique argues that by travelling further, firms and households can find more potential suppliers of goods and services, thereby increasing competition, encouraging efficiency gains and putting downward pressure on prices. The final result is income growth. He remarks: The average passenger trip distance over the period 1972-2002 went up by 56%, creating a remarkable potential area for shopping provision or house to live, up by 143%. This explanation is based on geometry: the area of a circle increase by the square of the radius. Average freight trip distance has gone by 70% expanding the area of potential suppliers by 190%. Echenique emphasizes that the economic benefit of longer distance travel are only realised if distance travelled increase without concurrently increase the time spent in travelling. If the increase in mobility leads to substantial increase in time devoted to travel, the benefit will be reduced and, possibly eliminated altogether. But with worsening congestion, he predicts that the average trip will start to decline, thereby reducing the availability of suppliers, increasing their monopolistic power, with the likely consequence of prices going up. This will results in an increase in the cost of living and cost of production, making the UK less competitive and thus slowing the growth in income. The remedy matters, Echenique suggests a combination of more infrastructure investment, particularly to the inter-urban road network and road pricing. Pricing on its own could be bad for the economy. If the charge necessary to reduce congestion increases greatly, making the average cost of travel for people and freight larger than the savings in time produced by price rationing then the reduction in the overall economic growth would follow. Echenique says that the ability of transport to reduce spatial monopolies is not considered in transport scheme appraisal. Asked how he would respond to concern about environmental impact of increasing long distance travel, Echenique stressed the importance of technological development such as more fuel efficient engines and alternative fuels. And he said that proportionally more effort should be made to reduce CO2 emission from buildings, which were a bigger emitter than transport. If this argument is well reported, do you think that this show understanding of network performance and network design? Is the network design comparable to an open field - the circle story? Does it understand driver route choice preference? and that 20% of the network carries about 80% of the traffic? Is average really telling us anything useful about travel behaviour or hiding most of the useful information? Does it stack up as an urban economy argument - does it not miss urbanisation economy, quality of life advantage which are negatively affected by for more roads and more speed (severance - which transport appraisal is not able to asses) and more pollution? ________________________________________ Alain