Since I wrote a post about congestion pricing/charging a week or so ago, a post has emerged on the excellent Human Transit blog, and Streetfilms have also put together a video on the issue:
As I noted in my previous post, I’m somewhat agnostic about congestion pricing. For me, it all comes down to the characteristics of the city you’re talking about and the way in which you’re proposing to implement such a scheme. For a city like New York, with an immensely strong core, a highly developed public transport system and natural geographic constraints, it’s utterly crazy that there’s no cordon-based charging scheme in place for Manhattan Island. The benefits of introducing such a scheme in Manhattan would be huge (reduced congestion plus a new revenue stream that’s desperately needed to help fund the extremely well used public transport system).
Auckland is a quite different place though, and until our central city core is much stronger and more robust – and until our public transport system is developed to a far greater extent – I don’t know whether it’s the solution we’re looking for.
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Congestion pricing requires congestion to exist.
Therefore it might be helpful in making congestion less of a pain but its not going to be the magic solution that will do away with all our troubles.
People will simply switch from complaining about congestion to complaining about charges. And also, how do they calculate how much to charge???
Personally I like the Auckland professor (I can’t remember the name unfortunately) proposal in the NZTA roads submission who proposed that the money should be refunded to ratepayers.