LONDON--In 2003, soon after London authorities slapped a tax on each vehicle entering the city center, traffic volume fell 15%, and drivers spent 30% less time in gridlock, according to the city's Transport for London. Commuters were delighted, and once-virulent opposition to the fee, now £8 ($16) a day, subsided.
Congestion charges are a big hit in London and Stockholm, which adopted a similar tax in 2007. Other cities are expected to follow suit. New York City plans to implement a charge this year, and politicians in Shanghai, China, and Sydney, Australia, are debating the idea. "As congestion becomes worse in other major cities, it becomes more likely that charges will be put in place," says Graeme Craig, Transport for London's director of congestion charging.
Congestion is a bane of urban life. The average U.S. commuter spends 38 hours stuck in traffic, according to a study released last September by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University in College Station. A century ago, economists suggested that road taxes would alleviate this ill. Since then, proposed schemes have included highway tolls, daily parking charges for cordoned areas, and graduated pricing based on time of day and kilometers traveled. Officials in Singapore first implemented a congestion charge in 1975; interest in such charges picked up considerably after London used the fee to untangle its downtown grid.
The tax is not a panacea. "You can't introduce it by itself and expect it to solve the problem," says Philip Blythe, a civil engineer at Newcastle University in the U.K. Charging schemes require detailed modeling of a city's layout, travel patterns, and public transportation, as well as occasional tweaks to maintain benefits. Still, some critics question whether the benefits will last. Transit time on London streets has slowed since the initial improvements; officials attribute this to construction projects.
As other cities mull a congestion tax, Blythe emphasizes that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. For example, freeway traffic tends to be a bigger problem than downtown traffic in Los Angeles and other cities in the western United States, says David Brownstone, a transport economist at the University of California, Irvine. Some cities may not be ready for congestion charges. In Beijing, "we need to construct more roads first, and we need to provide better public transportation," says Yang Xinmiao, an engineer at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Hoping to build on its success, officials in London will use its congestion charge scheme to turn the screws on less eco-friendly cars. Later this year, authorities plan to raise the charge for high-polluting vehicles--those that emit more than 225 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer--to £25. Blythe sees this trend eventually leading to a carbon-trading scheme for transport. "At some stage, we may have our own personal carbon allowance for travel," he predicts. "But first we have to get the basics right."CREDIT: MARTYN GODDARD/CORBIS
