Good day my good friend.

Even if this week’s budget was slightly disappointing on the road user charging front, there is still a lot being done in the UK on the subject. It’s just taking place away from Westminster, as today’s newsletter will show.

If you have any suggestions for interesting news items or bits of research to include in this newsletter, you can email me. I know that plenty of you have suggested articles – I will get to them soon!

James

The politics of Congestion Charging is about to get ugly

The two university cities of Oxford and Cambridge are going to be bold, in transport planning terms anyway. Both cities have put forward seperate plans to start meaningfully charging people to drive in the city. For Oxford, the County Council is seeking to apply a Workplace Parking Levy of between £400 and £600 per space across all businesses in Oxford. In Cambridge, the Greater Cambridge Partnership is proposing a £5 a day congestion charge for driving within Cambridge.

You can imagine how well this is going in the general media. Apparently, it is another nail in Oxford’s coffin, and is a perfect example of town versus gown. I mean, if you ignore the fact that it is insanely expensive to park in both Oxford and Cambridge, and that both cities have very good bus services and extensive park and ride systems, and are far from failing cities by any metric, there may be a point there. I don’t know what it is, but there may be.

Both schemes are playing the politics slightly differently. In Oxford, the sell is based on making the city greener and more just as part of a package of transport improvements in the city. In Cambridge, this is about the charge being part of a wider package of measures across Cambridge and its immediate hinterland, notably lower fares with more frequent buses. Both have made the significant play on the charges being part of (and part-funding) a wider package of transport improvement measures. But will this work?

The politics of congestion charging is messy. Experience from Manchester (where road user charging was rejected) showed that not maintaining political acceptance – nor a united front – led to its downfall. But support is much more complex and nuanced. Experience from Stockholm indicates it was a number of factors that led to public acceptance of making the congestion charge trial permanent – less traffic, and finding out the charges were not as bad as feared being particularly important. Experience from Gothenburg shows that being transparent in term of revenue allocation and who gets to charge what also helps.

All of this makes me wonder whether selling the ‘package’ is the right approach. There is a real risk of dispersing the message on why a charge is good (and the evidence shows it is) against a clear, understandable message on why a charge is bad. So lets make it clearer. Say something along the lines of “we think it will make the traffic and the environment better. We will try it out for a year, and reinvest the money we make in making buses better, then tell us how it was.” It’s specific, understandable, and says you are willing to be reasonable. So lets do it.

Graph of the week

The International Transport Forum released some very interesting data on the investment in transport infrastructure by different countries. No shock that China is investing the most, but the details are very interesting. For example, in the European Economic Area and Great Britain, 44% of inland transport investment is in railways. A figure that is somehow shocking and not shocking at the same time.

Something interesting

This is wonderfully geeky from the London Transport Museum. How do you make a bus blind? I never knew I wanted to know this until I watched this video.