Road Tolls Won't Solve Traffic Woes

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Writing in The Calgary Herald last week, Andrew Coyne advocated for road tolls in cities to alleviate traffic congestion. Simply, the argument is that by charging drivers you’ll shift demand to another mode of transportation. It’s a very basic supply and demand model to city transportation management. By affecting the demand (making driving more expensive) you change the supply through people seeking alternatives. It may serve utility in highly selective circumstances but is an otherwise flawed approach to reduce traffic woes.

In his article Mr. Coyne correctly outlines the generally accepted hypothesis that building more roads induces more traffic. The premise is that by offering more supply, you enable more demand. You then build more roads to service new demand; the process repeats itself.

The concern with road tolls in addressing traffic congestion is that they merely annoy those who can afford to drive and disenfranchises those already economically marginalized. Effectively, road tolls are a class-based tax. Additionally, the basic premise of road tolls to change driver behaviour is also flawed logic: once you remove those economically disenfranchised from the road – because they will no longer be able to afford to drive – you simply create supply for those who can afford it and once again create more traffic.

A wiser approach to reducing traffic demand is to offer alternatives. The overall structure for this is designing communities that are more conducive to other forms of transportation. By offering the right threshold and type of density you make the economics of servicing communities with public transportation more viable.[i]

Appropriately designed communities also make walking, cycling and other forms of non-motorized transportation more convenient. Lower density development requires more area to house a given population than one that is higher density. More area means farther distances to travel. As research indicates that there is a threshold distance people are willing to walk commute, low density communities by design discourage alternate means of transport.

Along with appropriately designed and located density, reducing traffic demand requires enabling other modes of travels. If bike lanes and associated infrastructure, car pool lanes and bus only lanes are given a higher priority than the single occupancy vehicle (SOV), the transportation system is augmented to make non-SOV travel more convenient.

There are numerous other approaches to affecting the supply and demand model of traffic management: offering bike share or car share programs, either through private initiative, public policy or private-public partnership; corporations and businesses allowing for non-standard work hours (i.e. the “9-5” work day); allowing staff to telecommute both from home or at work hubs outside of the office. These “quick win” solutions are shown to have success throughout cities across the globe.

Each approach to traffic demand management requires different implementation times and costs. Some are self-centric in that they require behaviour change of an individual. Some require a transportation system to be in place to allow for transportation options. Some require public expenditure, or changing the streams of public spending. Some private. They all require citizen will and political foresight.

People didn’t start driving because government created more taxes for horse drawn carriages and electric street cars. Point-to-point convenience, government incentives and lobby pressures induced driving. Taxing a socioeconomic class won’t change traffic congestion. Any predictable city of the future will include cars; they just won’t dictate the design and operation of them as much as they have for the past 70 years – it’s simply not sustainable to do so.

Follow Steven Snell on Twitter: @stevenpsnell

[i] Anecdotally, sensitive density increases property values. See, “Research suggests denser development is good for single-family home values”

