What are the best incentives for encouraging people to travel more efficiently?
Stuck in Traffic
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The bumper-to-bumper commuter traffic in the greater London area is among the worst in Europe. With chronic underinvestment in infrastructure since the second world war, Britain today is under-roaded by a factor of at least two compared with road use in other industrial countries. How Britain deals with its coming explosion in congestion over the next decade or so could have important implications for gridlock globally.
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Listen to the podcast: Cost of congestion
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 Approx. 13 mins |
Stephen Glaister CBE, professor of transport and infrastructure at Imperial College in London, outlines the options available for curbing congestion.
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The obvious answer is to tax transport highly. At least high enough to reduce congestion to tolerable levels. This also would be in line with a similar solution to reduce carbon emissions. The real questions is how this could made politically acceptable?
don't you think that taxing just bring in distortions that make evrything more complex to decypher for the user / consumer? Shouldn't we focus on a more long-term and stable mechanism such as the carbon emission market? taxing is always liable to be modified one way or the other depending on the current manner to please voters... however once a market for a given good is established it is becomes much more difficult to close it! one can regulate and that might be a
and that might be a way to bring in a political debtae dimension. When you think of it, do we pay the "real price" for transport? or take another example that makes the point even more stark: do we pay the real price for wheat flour when one knows that it takes 1,000 liters of water to grow one kilo of wheat... so probably around 1200 liters for a kilo of flour! i think the debate is an old one about public goods.
Total Posts: 4 - Pages (1): [1]