Take control of your own streets

Councils the length and breadth of Britain are smelling the money Red Ken is making and talking of introducing congestion-charging schemes. Interest groups are starting to complain at the introduction of yet another tax on motoring. But there are better models than Ken’s, which could bring real benefits.

Charging for road use is hardly a new idea. Beginning in 1663, a series of Private Acts of Parliament gradually transferred responsibility for highways from parishes to private Turnpike Trusts, which collected tolls and invested in roads. Over two centuries, about 10,000 miles of highways were thus privatised. Economic historian Dan Bogart has shown that Turnpike Trusts led to major improvements in the road system and — though unprofitable in their own right — increased economic growth by approximately 0.6 per cent.

In the 19th century, traffic shifted from highways to railways and the loss-making Turnpike Trusts could no longer maintain the highways. From 1871, responsibility was gradually transferred to highway boards and parishes. Since then, roads have remained largely in the hands of the state, which has found a variety of ways to charge road users to cover the costs of repair and maintenance.

And how! Today, the state collects around £30 billion from road users — mostly in fuel duty — and spends only around £7 billion. But demand for road use in many places exceeds supply, resulting in congestion, while vehicles damage the roads and impose costs on third parties through noise and air pollution.

Britain is not unique in these problems: many places have experimented with schemes to reduce them. Among the most interesting have been congestion-charging schemes such as those introduced in Singapore in the 1970s and Trondheim in Norway in the 1990s. Unfortunately, Ken Livingstone’s London scheme is a rather poor approximation of a congestion charge.