Road pricing - RIP?

So the government has finally ruled out national road pricing for the time being -- rather than rely on the convention that all Ms Kelly's predecessors have subscribed to - that road pricing is a great idea in theory - but unfortunately always ten years (or about seven Transport secretaries) away.  Indeed when I did transport policy in the No 10 Policy Unit in 1994, road pricing was ten years away -- so we must have had it for the last three years...

Galling to see the people who organised the guerrilla attack via the No.10 website glowing at their victory. But the fact that this can be reported as a victory -- rather than as a defeat and a setback - shows how poorly we have framed the debate about transport in this country under successive governments.  And how much we allow transport policy to be held in the thrall of motorists without realising that it profoundly affects everyone's quality of life and in a space constrained island appeasing motorists is a zero sum game - but noone else is well enough organised to get 2 million people to sign a petition. So if the motorists are victorious, who are the losers.

The news about the decision on road pricing coincided with reading "Car Sick" by Lynn Sloman, ex of Transport 2000.  Not probably high on the reading list of the Downing Street petitioners.  But some quite interesting stuff on the way planning and transport policy has evolved here over the decades compared to other European countries.  One of the stories that most surprised me talking to my mother was about the badly behaved dog she had when she worked in London.  She told me that aforesaid candidate for Dog Borstal was allowed to roam around the streets during the day -- the fences in their garden in South East London weren't high enough to keep him in.  When I asked how a dog could patrol the streets of London as though it was a village in Rajasthan she simply said that there were no cars...and that was the mid 1950s.

One of the interesting wakeup calls to come out of Car Sick is how recent mass car ownership and mass car use is - why Bruno could have the run of New Cross without becoming roadkill.  But the second really interesting compare and contrast is with the cycling enthusiasts of Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.  They were on the same track as us in the 1960s, redesigning cities around cars not people and seeing the same declines in cycling and walking as we did.  But the paths diverged some time in the mid-1970s - a function of the oil crisis, increased environmental and (maybe -- although it doesn't stop them smoking themselves stupid - health consciousness) and city planners started to invest in people as opposed to car infrastructure.  So the alleged cultural differences which get the Germans and Dutch on their bikes while we sit in our cars are actually the product of different policy choices.  And those choices have meant that some countries have managed to escape from having transport and planning policies dictated by motorists rather than all potential road users.

National road pricing may of course be less relevant here than lots of effective local schemes. It was never clear how you could combine a universal national scheme with widespread local schemes where local people reclaim their space and made it work for everyone - of all ages. And even for dogs. So it would be good if yesterday's announcement meant national road pricing is dead - long live lots of local road pricing. And while the person out of their car can enjoy more car-tamed environments, our petitioner friends can sit in frustrated tailbacks on the hard shoulder of the M1 wondering why no-one ever got to grips with managing demand for road space.

As a postscript, one of the other points in Car Sick is that there are huge amounts of ads for cars -- but none for cycling or walking or public transport. As a big consumer of daytime TV I can testify to the never ending diet of car ads between wickets in the cricket or at changes of end in the tennis - most of them telling me how green I would be by buying this car or another. But today they were joined by a totally bizarre and very annoying ad for public transport - funded by UNEP and the International Association of Public Transport. Enough to make me buy that Landrover Freelander 2 tomorrow.