Charging ‘could finance’ more roads

29 November 2006

The introduction of road charging in congested areas would justify rather than eliminate the need to widen or add new roads, according to a new report by the Independent Transport Commission.
The report, Investing in roads: Pricing, costs and new capacity, concludes that road pricing by itself would not reduce congestion sufficiently on Britain’s highways, and would need to be combined with road expansion. Indeed, the strongest case for new roads would be in areas where the proportion of revenue from charging against the cost of road expansion was highest.
In some suburbs and city fringes – where congestion is at its worst – the income from road charging could be more than ten times the cost of new highways, thereby justifying the economic case for expansion. For example, revenue would outweigh the costs of road building by up to 10.6 times on some of Greater London’s roads, while the figure rises to 20 on some of Tyneside’s main roads.
Conversely, road pricing revenues, and therefore congestion levels, are low in Cumbria, Lancashire and Cheshire, prompting the report’s authors to speculate that this was due to the region’s extensive network of existing motorways.
Where revenue from road charges was high, the report recommends building road tunnels to reduce disruption and environmental damage.
This opens up the prospect of revenue from road pricing paying to reduce noise from traffic and the division of communities, the report adds. Pricing may be a way of upgrading the quality of existing and new roads ‘to a standard fitting the expectations of people in the 21st century’.
By revealing the extent of demand to drive on specific roads, road charging provides economic indicators about where to widen roads, upgrade junctions, build tunnels and construct bypasses.
Professor Stephen Glaister, one of the report’s authors, concluded that where there was congestion, road schemes showed benefits exceeding costs ‘to an extraordinary degree. There are few public investments offering this kind of money’.

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