Road pricing is better than road communism

We need to take back control of our city streets

We grew up in a flat that backed onto a main road in London’s Zone 2. The speed limit was 30 mph but people regularly went way faster, as there were no cameras at the time to stop them.

Drink-driving was common and somewhat more socially acceptable before the mid-1980s, when the government began producing incredibly grim and haunting adverts to stigmatise it. (As an aside, the state doesn’t really produce any great scary adverts anymore, as they did in my childhood, from those short videos showing boys getting electrocuted retrieving their football to the terrifying Aids campaign).

Cars tended to dominate the streets, as you’d expect in a battle between 2 tons of steel and a few stones of flesh and organs. I’m pretty sure I never once played in a road as a boy; that aspect of childhood had been sacrificed for the sake of cars, which from the 1920s began to rack up huge numbers of pedestrian deaths. In 1966 almost 8,000 people were killed on Britain’s roads, about one every hour, and during my adolescence that was still running at 5,000 a year. Today the figure hovers between 1,700-1,800, which reflects not just better safety features but the fact that people — especially children — have been frightened off the road.

Yet for the entirety of my life it’s been a running theme of newspapers that every attempt to rein in drivers is a gross injustice: speed cameras are a scam, a way to rinse hard-working people, and your council is no better than the Stasi. The Tory press instinctively takes the side of car owners against speed cameras, even though each device on average saves two lives a decade.

Cars are incredibly dangerous, something that only really became apparent to many people following the spate of terror attacks in the 2010s. City streets across France, Germany and elsewhere were pedestrianised to prevent vehicles being used by organised jihadis or angry loners to kill people. If ISIS see cars as dangerous weapons, perhaps urban planners should.

It’s why I find it so strange that people who drive recklessly are not given lifetime bans, often going on to injure and kill innocent people; drivers who maim cyclists get absurdly light sentences, and are allowed to get back behind the wheel after a few years while their victim’s injuries might never heal. We regard their right to car use as more important than other people’s right to safety.

But safety is just one of many problems associated with motor vehicles. For all their positive transformative power in our lives, cars have huge negative externalities, and these get more pronounced as our population grows. This issue is hotting up as urban areas become more densely populated and plagued by traffic, and so restrictions become more widely used. Many people, especially Tory voters, aren’t going to like what’s coming; but I would suggest that there is really no other choice.

The main issue is the increasing use of LTNs — mini-car-free zones in parts of London’s suburbs — which tend to become very divisive. An experimental closure in my part of north London three years ago caused a huge amount of anger on the local Facebook group, something repeated across the capital.

Tories tend to be far more pro-car, especially as there is now a considerable voting gap in car ownership, related to the voting gap in density and family formation. Cars also, to some extent, represent ideas of freedom and self-reliance, which are historically aligned to the Tory party, especially that of Thatcher.

But I also think that car drivers are genuinely unaware of the negative externalities, not just of car use in the abstract, but of their driving cars. It’s not something you do independent of society, and even fuel duty and road tax does not cover its impact on others.

Whenever you drive in an urban area, the lives of everyone else around you become slightly worse; it’s not just pollution, which has drastically improved, nor the problem of noise, but also the space you use, the fear you create in pedestrians, the unsightly nature of jams and the huge amount of land cities must allocate for parking. 

Cars are hugely effective at destroying street life and civic community. The most eye-opening moment for me came about seven years ago when our street was closed for a whole summer because of road works, and the children became used to playing in it. It was basically like Bedford Falls. Indeed, research by Create Streets shows that people are considerably more likely to speak to their neighbours when their street is more pedestrian-friendly.

There is a vast amount of evidence showing that walkable cities are far happier. The same Create Streets research found that ‘37 per cent of residents in the most walkable neighbourhoods met the recommended minimum of at least 30 minutes of physical activity compared to only 18 per cent of those who lived in the least walkable neighbourhoods. Residents of the most walkable neighbourhoods were nearly two and a half times more likely to get sufficient physical activity than residents of the least walkable.’ Unsurprisingly, there is a strong link between walkability and obesity, and also happiness, since much of the ‘mental health crisis’ can be summed up in six words: be not solitary, be not idle. Every small thing that gets people walking and talking has a net benefit; urban car use helps to reduce these basic necessities.

Our high streets are dominated by cars, and car advocates argue that otherwise shops might close, yet the evidence suggests that pedestrianisation increases footfall. Shops regularly overestimate how many of their customers actually come by car. On top of this, ‘places with higher walkability perform better commercially.’ It’s just not true that pedestrianising high streets damages retailers; quite the opposite.

As for our restaurants, London missed a trick after the pandemic in failing to make street dining a permanent feature of certain streets during summer; this is what the Mayor of Paris did, but our equivalent is obviously unable to overpower the fun police at Westminster Council.

There are other, less obvious, negative externalities. Cars have had a catastrophic impact on the urban fabric, in particular its design; the United States is the worst affected, but in Britain it’s largely because of cars that the ugliest city centres tend to be in the richest part of the country, the Thames Valley. It’s not a lack of money that makes our towns so hideous, it’s the combination of planning rules, collective bad taste among designers, and car dominance.

Perhaps the biggest negative externality is simply traffic; the more people drive, the more they destroy the utility of other people driving. As the saying goes, you’re not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic. London drivers spend around 149 hours a year in congestion, costing the city £9.5 billion a year; across the United Kingdom traffic jams cost around £60 billion annually.

As London’s population has grown, its suburban traffic has become more intense. Where I live, in Zone 3, most roads are constantly blocked between 5 and 7, including many which only have space for one vehicle but remain two-way streets (with cars on both sides). These were mostly built in the 1890s and 1900s, before cars took off in popularity, and just can’t cope with this much traffic. As this problem get worse, so the logic of restrictions will become stronger.

Road pricing is therefore coming to London and many Conservatives will oppose it. Many Tories see themselves as being on the side of the driver, the plucky individualist persecuted by an overbearing state; indeed following this bizarre logic, in recent years Conservative governments have even clamped down on ‘over-zealous parking enforcement.’

I think they’re mistaken, both on a practical level but also on a fundamental point of principle. Free road use is not ‘individualism’, it’s an example of the inefficiency and poor service that follows when the price mechanism is absent.

If you’re stuck in traffic in an urban area, it’s because that piece of road is being underpriced. No one likes the cost of rush-hour trains, for example, but we understand that, if they weren’t more expensive than other journeys, they would become even more unbearable as everyone piled on to the same carriages. As a result, we would all suffer. Likewise, we pay more for flights during holiday times because that is when demand is highest; if airlines or rental companies weren’t allowed to charge more during peak season, the supply would dry up and collectively we’d all lose out. 

Road pricing simply ensures that people wishing to use the most in-demand stretches of road pay a premium for it, reducing traffic and the negative externalities the rest of us have to endure. That is not just fair, it’s fair in a way that free-marketeers understand in other circumstances. It’s not that urban drivers are selfish, but that many are unaware of the negative externalities of car use, beyond some quite abstract, global concept of the environment; that’s one issue, but the real problem is that over-car use is ruinous to neighbourhood quality of life.

Conservative philosopher Russell Kirk once referred to cars as ‘mechanical Jacobins’ and stated that they ‘could alter national character and morality more thoroughly than could the most absolute of tyrants’. Kirk was referring to the changes of social mores brought about by these inventions, which helped create the independent teenager and all that goes with it; but just as anathema to our worldview is the chaos and inertia brought about by car overuse. Of course road pricing isn’t ideal — no system which costs money is going to be entirely fair — but a price mechanism is the only way to reduce the ‘tragedy of the commons’ associated with urban gridlock. If no one pays to use a service, the service soon becomes unusable.