Only those in a position to manage the system at a reasonable scale have the ability to improve the capacity, and only then if the political incentive is there to do so.

Hmm, can’t think where that’s leading..

Sales of scooters and motorcycles have been rising about 25% a year for some time in Oz, and many other countries are experiencing similar or higher rates.

For liquid fuel efficiency (fuel consumed per kilometre per commuter), they are the hands down winner. They also make very efficient use of road and parking space.

My real issue is that we have this constant hype about innovation. Innovation is the powerhouse of Capitalism. Innovation is what creates all the wealth, blah, blah, blah. Yet here we have a real world problem with well understood, well researched and well established solutions that already exist. We don’t need any innovation (certainly not from an Engineering or Physics perspective). Sure the nanowire Lithium sounds interesting (sounds flammable too) and sure you can keep squeezing more efficiency out of a solar cell (up to the thermodynamic limit) and there’s supercapacitors, engine management, regenerative braking and all that good stuff for research — all pointless if people are simply unwilling to actually use it.

As for viable alternatives, you have to look at it from a large scale point of view. Yes, our public transport systems have existing bottlenecks but no, the individual commuter really can’t be responsible for ironing out those bottlenecks. Only those in a position to manage the system at a reasonable scale have the ability to improve the capacity, and only then if the political incentive is there to do so.

For example (again, a Sydney example), the new Winsor road running Northwest from the city has a fully separate parallel road (called “T-Way” officially and “MT-Way” unofficially) purely built for bus transport. However, a bus runs past only every 20 minutes or so, meaning that about 99.95% of the time any given piece of that road is completely vacant. Strangely, you would think that someone spending a large amount of money on a strip of road would also spend money on something to drive up and down that road. Instead they spent some millions on an “innovative” ticket system (to replace the perfectly functional existing ticket system) and then discovered that the old ticket system actually worked and the new one didn’t.

In a nutshell: you can’t solve bad management by throwing more innovation at the problem and all the technology in the world won’t change the attitudes of people who aren’t interested. Our obsession with innovation is fundamentally an exercise in procrastination while we hope that some boffin will magically fix our social problems.

It’s clear that a pricing signal of this sort works - in Brisbane the council and government have reduced the availability and jacked up the price of car parks for commuters - $30 a day now at South Bank - which has the side benefit of meaning that short-term parking is now available. Unfortunately the creaky public transport system is unable to cope with the extra demand and the parking policy generates no revenue for new infrastructure. It also doesn’t address the executive types in their V8s and SUVs who get to park in their buildings at corporate expense by making them pay. A congestion charge would only apply in peak hours, so people could still drive to shop or meet appointments in the CBD - uses for which cars are well suited - without incurring it.

Of course at some point the administrative costs might outweigh any economic advantages. However technology is pretty good at measuring simple things like weight and km-driven and tying it to automatic payments.

Every German truck participates in such a scheme. Amongst other things they monitor driver-road time for compliance with regulations, but they also capture tolling details.

I hate greenies (as you may have noticed) but I would approve of such a scheme, provided the revenue offset tax cuts and the bottom quintile was fully compensated. I would expect that the charges could be designed so that 100 per cent of the necessary revenue could be provided by the top 80.

What was the point of 24? You can see the empirical merit of a carbon tax and income tax cuts and the 30/30 but you are prejudiced?

Thanks for sharing.

It’s not just the safety either, it’s the supposed ‘prestige’ attached to being able to afford a bigger vehicle.

FWIW, I read recently that scooter sales have been rising pretty dramatically in Australia. In many European cities they are almost as common as cars of course.

The answer is that people feel safer on the road with all that steel around them. The reason they need such protection is because of all the other people on the road driving heavy vehicles with poor visibility and little or no interest in the survival of other motorists. Then one person buys a massive 4WD SUV and becomes the biggest thing on the road and the person next to them feels threatened so they also buy a big SUV to feel important again. Thus, there is a high perceived value in the safety and self-importance that comes with being the biggest and heaviest thing on the road — much higher than the cost of petrol.

I would think that this is a classic tragedy of the commons. The only way to fix it is to directly tax vehicles for the space they occupy on the road and the proportion of danger that they impose on other road users — or much higher fuel prices.

I’d also like to see private motor vehicle insurance providers offer per-km-based insurance. I believe they do in the UK.

All this could add up to it being considerably cheaper to buy a compact fuel-efficient vehicle and use it only for difficult-to-substitute trips than it is today, but considerably more expensive to buy a large fuel-inefficient difficult and use it for everything (including driving the kids 5 minutes to school).

The primary concern might be the effect it would have on businesses that currently rely on heavy road-based transport that don’t have viable alternatives. Making business-usage exempt would be foolish, as people would inevitably find ways of classifying most of their driving as for business needs, and at any rate, there are plenty of opportunities for businesses to reduce their fuel usage too, given the right economic incentives. But it should be possible to avoid the scenario of putting large numbers of companies that have no realistic choice other than to truck goods around out of business.

- address traffic with road use pricing
- address CO2 emission with a tax on fossil fuel (equal rate no matter whether coal, oil, whatever)
- address road wear with a tonnage/mileage-based charge (bearing in mind that wear varies as the 4th power of axle weight)
- address third party insurance with a mileage-based charge plus excesses for the accident-prone
- address administration costs (including provision of anonymised GPS for above charging purposes) with a flat registration fee

No particular faith in today’s rigged markets, or a market semi-unrigged by carbon pricing alone, but a rigorously unrigged market capturing all externalities would go some way to doing the job.

Compensatory measures should also start with removal of adjustment disincentives. Nobody should pay stamp duty when they trade a public transport poor residence for a public transport rich one (or perhaps never under a price ceiling). FBT should not favour employer-subsidised car costs over employer-subsidised public transport costs.

None of this is to deny that positive compensation - decidedly not by way of car use subsidy - will be needed for the poor stuck in the unserviced burbs, or that crash investment in mass transit and rail freight funded by energy taxes is not essential.

Oh wait, was that the 30/30 policy?

(Seriously, I actually think John’s proposal is sound enough, but lots of people have proposed similar ideas, and governments so far have seemed underwhelmed by the idea).

http://www.cis.org.au/policy_monographs/pm80.pdf

There is still time for Rudd to read it, see the light and come out a hero.

One other problem that occurs to me is that some foreign countries (Japan, Germany and the US) may regard this as an unfair tax break and seek to penalise their companies who take advantage (ie by taxing them on those profits in their home country as well).

The other disadvantage would be that the tax saved might just mean a lower foreign tax credit for (particularly US corporations) - and no further investment in Australia. However, I would expect that this would be at least balanced by an unwinding of corporate HQ current profit-shifting to Singapore etc.