Road Pricing: Ask A Stupid Question...

Once again, the giant herring of congestion charging is raising its scarlet head in the UK, with Ken Livingstone seeking ways to raise money for his own use in London. I don't blame Ken. He's using one of the very few avenues that a power-hungry prime minister has left open to him. But that doesn't make it any better an idea in principle.

Now, I'm not against making the motorist pay more. Anything that can make people use their cars less, or at least use them more responsibly, is fine by me. But road pricing in particular is a uniquely pointless and inefficient way of achieving that aim. If the government genuinely wants to ease the burden on the ordinary motorist, I call its attention to the simple two-part programme at the end of this article.

The economics of travel in the UK is a sick joke. I need a car, to get to some of the places I want to go. That means I need to pay the monstrous fixed costs of tax, insurance and depreciation. Having paid those, the marginal cost per mile of actually driving the thing is relatively slight. I can't afford to use public transport, because I'm already committed to spending several hundred pounds a year on just owning a car, whether or not I ever use it - so I use it as much as I can.

This perversity of incentives is what has given us the worst of all possible worlds on our roads. The poorest are still excluded from the freedom that car ownership brings, because of this high cost of ownership - and because of the borderline-criminal cartels of manufacturers, dealers and fleet buyers that quite deliberately inflate the prices of new cars. But anyone who owns a car, from a Mini to a Mercedes, has the incentive to use it as much as possible.

This is precisely the wrong way round. My idea of a perfect world would be one in which everybody who wanted one owned a car, but nobody used it more than about once a week, because public transport was popular and adequate to serve their everyday needs. The closest that exists to this situation at present is, in fact, in London, thanks to a comprehensive and comprehensible public transport system, plus our old friend: congestion.

Congestion is the one thing that stands against the perverse incentives of public policy. With a positively karmic simplicity, it affects exactly the same people who cause it; and it is progressive, affecting them in exact and direct proportion to how they value their own time. This, of course, is why it raises the hackles of the rich and important so much: they can't buy their way out of a traffic jam. Yet.

And congestion charging is designed to 'correct' this non-existent problem. Rather than making motorists pay for the external costs their driving inflicts on the environment - a cost that is easily and proportionately passed on through the eminently fair fuel tax - it seeks to charge people who sit in traffic jams. Unlike 'delay', however, it will be the same for all motorists - which means that it will be unnoticeable for the rich, a significant burden on the poor.

And it will do this, not by an automatic and simple mechanism, but by inflicting on the country a new and costly capital infrastructure - paid for by taxes. A new bureaucracy, a new set of roadworks, a new piece of paper for every motorist to fill in, a new permit for them to maintain - a new fixed cost, in short, of owning a car. This is an idea that is understandably pushed by the electronics and communications companies who would get the contracts to instal this infrastructure; it is pushed by the MPs who represent their constituencies; it is pushed by rich car owners who want to get the rabble off the roads, and by oil companies who want to do whatever they can to deflect attention from the fact that it's very simply burning petrol that causes the real damage of motoring. And this unsavoury axis of vested interests then has the monumental chutzpah to assume that I am bound to support their case because I'm a motorist!

Let's go back to the drawing board. The real problem is not car ownership, but car use; so let's make car ownership cheaper relative to use. The answer is so simple:

• Abolish road tax: a regressive and obsolete tax that subsidises drivers of 'veteran' (read: 'inefficient') cars, helps to tax the poorest out of car ownership altogether, and requires a substantial and worthless bureaucracy just to sustain it.
• Subsidise public transport: it's cleaner, safer, and it can work, if only it could compete on price by removing the external subsidy to all drivers.
• Continue escalating the price of fuel.

This last is controversial, but I believe that the pathetic public failure of the selfish 'Boycott the Pumps' campaign - a failure that flew in the face of massive promotion from self-serving, Jaguar-driving media pundits from the Daily Mail to the BBC - shows that ordinary drivers do not consider fuel prices to be unfair. They know that responsible driving is efficient driving, and petrol taxes are by far the simplest and most effective way to encourage it. And they are not as stupid, blinkered and selfish as our elected representatives would like to think.