Drive (42 page)

No doubt he was exaggerating for effect, especially since most cities aren't as choked with traffic as all the complaining from drivers would suggest, but the situation is deteriorating around the world. A few places have been smart enough to invest heavily in transit: in the last decade, Madrid has more than doubled the size of its subway system, which is now the third largest in the world with over three hundred kilometres of track. But most cities haven't shown the same gumption and simply expect transportation engineers to struggle with little more than new technology to ease gridlock.

Since it's obviously going to take more than that, politicians will have to get serious. Two weeks before Toronto's municipal elections in 2003, mayoral candidate David Miller mused that if the senior levels of government didn't pony up their share for transit funding, perhaps drivers who took the main highways into the city would have to pay a toll of $2.25 for the privilege, the same as the cost of hopping on a subway, streetcar or bus at the time. Commuters were outraged, and John Tory, a frontrunner for the job, seized the opportunity to paint Miller—who in the previous weeks had made an impressive charge from behind to become a serious contender—as a typical tax-and-spend politician. Miller might have blown his chance, but he quickly backtracked and said Toronto would never have tolls as long as he was mayor. The about-face was certainly crucial to his eventual electoral success and now, as mayor, he will only talk about tolls as a regional solution.

For all his progressive talk, Miller is just one more politician without the guts to take tough decisions against cars and drivers— unlike Ken Livingstone. At the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit, a New York City conference in May 2007 that put municipal leaders and corporate executives together in an effort to tackle climate change, the mayor of London admitted that he faced a lot of opposition when he introduced a congestion levy in his city. “There was this drip, drip, drip of negativity and it took a toll on
my poll ratings,” he said. “But within a week of the congestion charge starting, my opinion poll rating had gone up 12 percent.”

Livingstone congratulated New York mayor Michael Bloomberg's “courageous” plan to introduce an eight-dollar congestion toll for Manhattan. If it goes through, the charge will generate an estimated five hundred million dollars a year, revenue that will be spent on tunnels, commuter railroads, subways and buses. The famously left-wing Londoner also gave the billionaire Republican some advice: “There may be one or two people who predict doom and gloom. Ignore them. We can't solve the problem of global warming without getting a better balance between mass transit and the motor car.”

In 2003, London started charging five pounds for vehicles entering, leaving, driving or parking on a public road in the central zone between 7 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. (since cut back to 6 p.m.) on weekdays. Taxis, hybrids and electric cars are exempt. The fee increased to eight pounds in 2005, and just a couple of weeks before I arrived in March 2007, the city expanded the zone westward. (Initially designed to reduce congestion, the charge is increasingly also an environmental measure. The next step, if Livingstone has his way, will be to raise the cost for Chelsea tractors and other vehicles that emit more than 225 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre to twenty-five pounds.)

The proceeds don't go into the city's general budget and must be spent on improving public transit. In the first year, the toll led to an 18 percent decrease in the number of cars and trucks entering the zone and an increase of between 14 and 21 percent in the speed they travelled. Congestion has increased since then, but traffic would have increased without the charge and at least now it's growing from a lower base. As a tourist, I definitely noticed a difference from the last time I'd been there five years earlier. During the week, at least; on Saturday, when the charge doesn't apply, the traffic thickened and slowed to what I remembered.

Not everyone is as impressed as I was. I heard plenty of moaning, and Chris Prior, who sees the toll as “a blunt instrument” and “an example of everything that's wrong with government,” was upset enough that he decided to run for mayor against Livingstone. As the leader of the Stop Congestion Charging Party, he will, if elected in May 2008, abolish the toll on his first day in office. His arguments against it include that too much of the charge—about two-thirds, in fact—goes to collecting it rather than improving public transit, it's regressive because it takes more of a nurse's salary than a banker's and it just forces the congestion outside the zone. Instead, he'd improve public transit and marry communications technology with new, more flexible forms of transportation such as shared taxis and smaller, electric buses.

Prior drives a Prius—and not just because hybrids are exempt from the toll—but dressed in a dark blue suit, crisp white shirt and sober tie, he appeared to be the stereotypical Conservative and, in fact, he told me, “I believe very much that government should be about cutting taxes and improving the quality of public administration.” By contrast, Livingstone may best be known by his “Red Ken” moniker. The irony is that congestion tolls—now derided as tax grabs, restrictions on freedom and a plot hatched by lefties and tree huggers—were first touted, decades ago, by the likes of Alan Walters, who went on to be chief economic advisor to Margaret Thatcher, and Milton Friedman, the economist who was so influential in the rise of neo-conservatism in the 1980s. To thinkers of this ilk, drivers only consider their own costs when they take a congested road; they don't take into account the cost they impose on others by slowing everyone down. When drivers must pay to use a road, they face the true cost of their decision, which reduces demand and creates a more efficient use of the capacity.

Although all drivers can figure out what they pay for gas, insurance and other car-related expenses, and some can even put
a value on their time, few ever think about what economists call an “externality”—the public cost of congestion. Since Georgina Santos, a lecturer at the University of Oxford's Transport Studies Unit, has looked into this and co-authored a paper titled, “Road Pricing: Lessons from London,” I took the train to Oxford. Best known for its university, the city is also the home of a BMW plant that has produced over one million Minis, but I was impressed by the sea of bikes locked up at the train station, and at lunchtime I saw far more bikes than cars on the road, and the sidewalks were crammed with people.

Inside her tidy office, Santos, who is originally from Argentina, explained that external costs vary with the type of vehicle and amount of congestion. Theoretically, if a government charges more than the true cost, it will reduce traffic too much, stunting economic activity; but if it doesn't charge enough, the roads will remain clogged with traffic. In practice, politics determines the price: Livingstone initially decided to make both cars and trucks pay five pounds—an easy-to-remember round number—even if that meant the plan overcharged cars and undercharged trucks. “I'm not a politician, I'm an academic,” admitted Santos, a slim woman who wore several bracelets that jangled on her wrist as she talked. “Any academic economist would say, ‘You are crazy, you cannot charge the same toll to cars and to trucks. That is against economic theory, completely against.' And yet, he got traffic congestion down and the benefits in time-savings have been considerable.”

She recommended that cities thinking of copying London's example do three things. First, ensure the tolled zone is well served by public transit; otherwise, people have no option but to pay the charge. Second, consult the public, and tweak the plan based on that input, but don't hold a referendum, because people won't vote for it. Third, keep it simple. London initially chose a small area with clear limits and a flat toll that was easy to understand— even if it didn't exactly hold to economic theory.

Despite the success of the original plan, the westward expansion was controversial. Even supporters questioned the decision to give residents a massive discount (though that did mean the wealthy denizens of Kensington and Chelsea suddenly switched from being the biggest grumblers to placated beneficiaries). That concession worries Stephen Glaister. A professor of transport and infrastructure at London's Imperial College, he is an economist who needs a congestion charge for his office: the large room was overflowing with papers, files, reports and books on shelves, on the floor and in file boxes. I sat down in a chair behind a pile of papers on the long table attached to his desk. It was late afternoon, and the tail of his rumpled white shirt was no longer tucked in at the back and his red-and-blue tie hung a couple of inches below his undone top button. As we talked, he rose several times to grab a book or a report and I was impressed at how quickly he located them, though at one point several file boxes tumbled to the floor.

A member of the Transport for London Board, which is the executive agency for the mayor, Glaister supports the congestion charge, but while he understands why the city gave people in the original zone the discount—the charge was new and the residents were few—he fears that maintaining the special status for those in the new area will jeopardize future expansions. “There's absolutely no point in even thinking about introducing a congestion charging scheme if you give discounts to residents,” he said. “Once you do that, you've given it away because most traffic is local.”

That precedent is particularly unfortunate since he's really more interested in road pricing for London as a whole and for other parts of England. “Congestion actually is much more serious in outer London than it is in the centre,” said Glaister, who owns a Prius but cycles to work. “That's where the grief is. This is because it's much like the rest of the country: public transport isn't an alternative out there.” The solution is to invest money to improve transit in outer London and then introduce the congestion charge to pay for it. But that will require not just dinging all
residents but also replacing the daily fee with one based on how far a driver travels and when, which would require more advanced technology.

Glaister also had advice for other cities. “Number one, look at the facts. Don't listen to taxi drivers and the general public,” he said. The second step is to take a lot of care in the design of the plan, not just how, where and when drivers will be charged—and which ones will get exemptions or discounts—but what the money collected will be spent on. Some jurisdictions may want to reduce gas taxes to make the toll revenue neutral; others will dedicate it to public transit. “Then be very careful to present the complete picture to the public before you give them half a chance to go off on the wrong foot.”

TOLLS MAY BE AN IDEA
that some people and some cities are finally willing to debate, but free parking remains the blind spot in urban and transportation planning. During my trip, I'd heard various estimates (four, eight, thirteen) for the number of parking spots per car in North America and I have to admit that, initially, I was shocked. After all, like most people, when I'm driving around hunting for a legal space—all the while burning fossil fuels, spewing emissions and adding to the traffic congestion—it never occurs to me that North American cities devote so much space to parking. But the typical driver has a parking spot at home and one at work (usually bigger than the cubicle he or she spends all day in) as well as shared spots at malls, stores, restaurants and even churches. We're so accustomed to abundant free parking that we resist paying for it, hate looking for it and, most of all, dread getting tickets. As Donald Shoup, America's parking guru, told me, “Everybody thinks parking is a personal problem, not a policy problem.” But everybody is wrong.

Born in California in 1938, Shoup was living in Honolulu when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. Now a professor at UCLA's urban planning department and the author of
The High
Cost of Free Parking
, he has a growing band of followers who call themselves Shoupistas even though the market-oriented policies he advocates could best be summed up by the battle cry, “Charge whatever the traffic will bear.” He'd offered to arrange “free (or rather fully subsidized) parking” for me, but I wanted to take the bus in order to experience public transit in Los Angeles. I made it to UCLA forty-five minutes early and spent the time checking out the campus and then went up to his office and found a bald man with a grey beard sitting at a desk with a radio in the shape of a parking meter on it.

Shoup isn't sure what the ratio of parking spots to cars is—he suspects it's at least three or four to one, probably more—but he knows it's too high. He's also convinced that free parking not only encourages people to drive—it's actually expensive because subsidizing it costs the economy more than the government devotes to Medicare. Turning to his computer, he showed me aerial photos of several cities to demonstrate how much land we waste just to give drivers a place to leave their wheels. “Parking is the single-biggest land use in almost any city and almost everybody has ignored it,” he told me. “It's like dark matter in the universe: we know there's something there, and it seems to weigh a lot, but we don't know what it is. If only we could get our hands on it.”

While he was at his computer, he also gave me a virtual tour of Old Town Pasadena, with before and after photos that showed how it had gone from skid row to upscale destination. One of his ideas was instrumental in that transformation. The city faced a common problem: parking was free, but the few merchants who were still in business complained that it was inadequate. The people who worked in the stores took most of the spots, leaving customers to drive around searching for one—or just staying away. Meanwhile, the city had a vision of a revitalized downtown but no money to repair sidewalks, plant trees, increase security or take any of the other steps necessary to attract people. Shoup recommended charging enough for parking to maintain an
85 percent occupancy rate and using the money shoppers dropped in the meters to improve the neighbourhood. The revenue couldn't go into the city's general coffers; it had to be spent on the streets. Once that happened, the business community started to invest too—even sandblasting and renovating derelict buildings— and soon the shop owners, who had initially opposed meters, wanted to charge for parking until midnight. They wanted the money for the improvements, but they also discovered that their fears about scaring away customers were unfounded—anyone who really wanted to shop or eat in the area was willing to invest a few quarters. As the area became more popular, the meters raised more money for more improvements, which increased the popularity. And so on. The city now collects one million dollars a year to pay for upkeep that includes sweeping the sidewalks nightly and steam-cleaning them twice a month.