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Road congestion: the stark reality

By Peter Stopher - posted Friday, 1 September 2006


Few would disagree that roads in Australian major urban areas are becoming increasingly congested, especially in peak periods. The peaks are also getting longer, so that it is becoming less easy to avoid the peaks by leaving earlier or later.

Looking around the world, we can see that congestion is likely to continue to worsen, and that what we consider to be serious congestion is still much less than is experienced in many other major cities. With population growth and increasing expectations of mobility, congestion will increase. Building roads and public transport systems has not kept pace with growth for many years, and is unlikely to in the future.

UK and US studies indicate that about one third of congestion is due to accidents, road works, and other temporary situations. The remainder is “recurring” congestion and occurs because there is not enough road capacity to accommodate demand.

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So, what do we do about it?

Obviously, one possibility is to do nothing. However, this will result in an increasing waste of resources and time as congestion gets progressively worse and cars and trucks spend larger amounts of time in stop and go traffic. Most politicians favour improving public transport as the solution. Unquestionably, improving public transport is a necessary step in combating congestion. Even though public transport carries a minority of travellers, it is important to maintain or increase public transport’s market share as much as possible.

At the same time, we must be realistic about what public transport can do. In Sydney, public transport carries about 10 per cent of all daily travel, and about 20 per cent of commuting travel. The public transport system currently has little spare capacity.

The Sydney region is growing by around 1 per cent a year. With total public transport ridership being about 1.65 million trips a day, this means that, to keep pace with growth, public transport must accommodate 16,500 more rides each year. Roughly half of Sydney public transport users ride buses, and half ride trains.

On average, a bus in the peak period carries 36 passengers, and a train carries 850 passengers. If we split the increase equally between bus and train, then each year, we must add at least 230 new bus trips and around ten more train trips throughout each day, assuming these peak loadings. Most of these have to be added in the peak periods, where we already have congestion on both the road and rail system.

In the morning peak, Sydney public transport carries about half a million riders, so that one third of this increase has to be accommodated in the morning peak - about 80 new bus trips a year and 3 more train trips each year. In the meantime, car traffic has also grown by 1 per cent each year, so that road congestion continues to worsen.

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In the morning peak period about 1.75 million cars are used and this is increasing by 17,500 each year from population growth. Using current figures, these extra cars carry about 24,600 people.

If we accommodated these on public transport, so that the number of cars stayed the same as today, then public transport ridership must grow by 1 per cent each year to accommodate growth, plus at least another 24,600 riders each year on top of that in the morning peak alone. This increase is three times as big as the natural growth increase that public transport needs to carry.

Second, using the same assumptions as before, this means another 342 bus trips and 15 train trips are needed in the morning peak, assuming that each bus and train carries this peak load. This means that 422 bus trips and 25 train trips are being added in the morning peak each day, just to accommodate growth and keep congestion from getting any worse. Actually, road congestion will get marginally worse, because extra bus trips are added to an already congested road system, and each bus causes about the same congestion as 2.5 cars, so it will be similar to adding 1,000 cars.

This number of buses and trains must be added each year, not just as a one-time expansion of capacity. If these were added in one year and then nothing else done, the traffic would continue to worsen thereafter.

We conclude from this that major investment is needed in public transport just to keep pace with the growing demand for travel, as population grows, and that it is probably unlikely that government can find sufficient money to increase road capacity to accommodate most of the growth in car travel which will become increasingly congested.

Can congestion be reduced by building new roads? In modern times, it has become clear that this is impossible. When road capacity is added to reduce congestion, the congestion reductions are short-lived, because people travel more and further with the added capacity; congestion eventually returns to the same level as before, or becomes worse.

One reason for this is that road users do not pay the real costs of using the road, and so adding new road capacity is almost like giving people free tickets to travel - they will choose to travel more, and further. However, this is also not to say that more road capacity should not be built. We are talking here about building extra road capacity to try to reduce congestion. On the other hand, if we road-building just stops, then those additional 17,500 car trips in the morning peak per year will have to squeeze into the existing road space, which is already congested.

In Sydney, on average, trips by car are about 10-11km long. That means about 175,000 additional vehicle kilometres of travel must be accommodated in the system each year in the morning peak. On average, main roads and motorways can accommodate about 1,200 vehicles an hour per lane. If the morning peak lasts two hours, then an extra 73 lane kilometres are needed every year in each direction, just to accommodate growth.

The M2 motorway in Sydney is 20km long and has two lanes in each direction - 40 lane kilometres in each direction. The amount of new road space required to accommodate just population growth so that congestion gets no worse is equivalent to building about two new M2 motorways every year.

It should be clear that dealing with congestion is a major problem. Not only does it look as though it cannot be reduced, but it will be difficult to stop it getting progressively worse.

Can nothing be done about this?

There are some things we can do about it. One of the most obvious is to change the way in which those who use roads pay for using them. At the moment, we pay for roads through fuel taxes, vehicle registration, and some other taxes. However, apart from the fact that cars use more petrol in “stop and go” conditions than in free-flowing conditions, we don’t pay for the congestion we cause.

What we pay for road use at the moment is very insensitive to where and when we choose to drive, and does not represent the real costs imposed on others (through delay), on the environment (through noise, pollution, and so on), and through accidents. Many experts would describe fuel taxes as a blunt instrument for charging for road use.

Even with increasing petrol prices, cars are perceived as inexpensive, and we choose to drive where and when we wish. We are much more responsive and responsible in our choices when we are required to pay a sufficient amount to stop and think as to whether we really need to make that expenditure.

The car is really free at the point of use, because we don’t put our hands in our pockets to pay to use the car each time we want to go somewhere. If we did, we might think twice about whether or not we really had to use it. This is the principal behind road user charging.

A type of road user charging already exists in many places in Australia - tolls for the use of bridges, tunnels, and motorways. Most of these are point payment tolls. If you use the facility, you go through a toll point and pay. However, rather like the excise taxes on fuel, this is a blunt instrument. It doesn’t matter when you use the facility, or, in the case of the motorways, how far you travel, you pay the same.

To reduce congestion, however, we need to think about charging people according to when they want to drive (because roads are much more heavily congested at 8am than they are at 10am or 5am); where they want to drive (driving into the city at 8am is much more congested than driving into the bush at 8am); and how far they want to drive, because the further we travel in congested conditions, the more we contribute to the congestion.

One way in which congestion levels could be managed and prevented from getting too far out of hand is to introduce Time-Distance-Place charging, meaning that each driver is charged according to the time of day at which they drive, the distance they drive, and where they are driving.

We have the technology to make this possible. This type of charging would be very similar to what we already do in paying for mobile telephone calls - we pay different rates for peak and off-peak, we pay for how long we are on the phone, and we pay different rates according to where we are.

If this type of payment system was introduced for using roads throughout Australian urban areas, we might be able to prevent congestion from getting too severe like it has already in other cities of the world and we might find it possible to manage the use of our roads so that we got more out of the capacity of the system.

There are some other conditions that must go along with this. Before such a system is introduced, those who don’t want or cannot afford to spend the money to travel at certain times by car must have reasonable alternatives. That means spending substantial money on upgrading, improving, and expanding public transport systems.

Second, we need to treat this as a system that replaces some existing charges. While it is probably not possible to make such a system revenue neutral, (because it will cost something to collect the charges, and we are trying to change people’s behaviour, so making it revenue neutral probably defeats that purpose), we should probably only introduce such a system in conjunction with removing most or all of fuel excise taxes, and registration charges.

It is also probably necessary to do something else that Australia has been reluctant to do, which is to require that the revenue be spent on improving the transport system and to provide more options for those who do not wish to spend the money to use their cars.

It is also clear that such a charging scheme should be only one part of a set of strategies that should be used to try to reduce or manage congestion. What those other strategies are is the subject for another article. For this article, suffice it to say that road user charging should not be considered as a single policy that will, on its own, reduce or eliminate congestion. It will not do so, and applied on its own, could actually be quite damaging.

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About the Author

Peter R. Stopher is the Professor of Transport Planning at the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies, The University of Sydney.

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