Recently I was very privileged to be invited to a Greener Journeys thought leadership dinner that debated whether road pricing was ever likely to be a realistic weapon in the armoury to combat road congestion. I was amongst a group of eminent transport economists and Government officials and after wondering what the collective noun for a group of eminent transport economists was (an NPV maybe?) I enthusiastically joined in the debate.
The conclusion was that road pricing was still difficult to achieve politically particularly in its purest form. However compromise positions were considered to be more politically acceptable and therefore potentially deliverable such as top slicing road tax and hypothecating the sums raised into local authority funding pots for popular measures such as pothole repairs and general improvements to the carriageway.
This got me thinking about lane rental systems which are an incremental form of road pricing. Rail privatisation has been criticised by many but one aspect which encourages sensible economic behaviour was the creation of delay attribution which puts a monetary value on delays and incentivises participants to consider how to reduce ‘delay minutes’ which can be attributed to them. Hence the emergence of ‘thunderbird’ rescue locos and pre preparation of new track work away from the works site as track authorities and train operating companies alike innovate with clear business cases to reduce costs of delays to the network caused by them.
No such incentives are present on our highway network – or at least that’s what I thought – but it turns out a quiet revolution has been taking place in London and Kent where lane rental has been trialled with encouraging results. For example between 2015 – when the trial was introduced – and 2017 utility companies have worked together 600 times coordinating activities at the same location up from 100 times for a corresponding period beforehand and Transport Minister Jo Johnson was quoted as saying that ‘lane rental has seen a massive drop in disruption.’
So this will now be rolled out nationwide with the first schemes outside the trail area due to take place from late 2019 onwards. The utility companies are not happy, with their trade organisation Streetworks UK describing the initiative as a ‘blunt instrument’. But surely the prospect of a financial penalty of up to £2,500 a day per lane occupied will encourage better ways of working, more innovation and reinstatement outside hours of operation to save this charge. And competition in the utility sector means that companies will have to think twice about automatically passing this on to consumers.
Of course this doesn’t automatically guarantee a vast improvement in the reliability of bus services. Interestingly lane rental doesn’t apply to works undertaken by highway authorities on their own highway and of course to benefit fully from the concept it must be that utility companies do exhibit the right behaviours and be innovative like the train operating companies and Network Rail to reduce their delay attribution rather than just passing the ‘fine’ on to the customer.
But coming right back to the argument about road pricing, introducing lane rental is a small step towards more rational use of our highways. They are a precious resource and capacity should not be reduced by endless holes dug up and then left for days – or more annoyingly reinstated with another utility coming back a few months later. And private car users also eventually need to be reined in so use of the road network is more rational. The replacement of the standard vehicle duty with a more progressive system of charging weighted by the amount of use on the most congested parts of the network is a logical end point and would, for example, combat private hire drivers that drive round and round waiting for the call for their next fare and contributing to congestion.
All of this would of course help the most efficient users of road space – buses and coaches – to achieve greater levels of punctuality and reliability. But a good start will be the commencement of lane rental across the country and we await its commencement with interest.
