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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
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