Monday Musing: Is dynamic kerbside pricing the answer to congestion?

In my last Monday Musing What drives behaviour change so fewer journeys are made by car? I stopped short of discussing the kerbside and deliveries.  This was another topic under discussion at the BPA conference because the kerb has been under significantly more demand.   Where the kerb is completely blocked by parked vehicles, deliveries and taxis have to stop in the highway, which is not only unsafe, it causes congestion.

No-one yet knows how much time will be spent in an office or working from home and although online purchases and home deliveries have dropped since the height of the pandemic, they are still higher than they were pre-pandemic and this poses some difficulties for traffic planners.  To prevent the annoyance of double parking or having to cruise to find a parking space, should on-street parking be charged a higher price?  Who should have access to the kerb?  There are places where parking has to be on-street because residents have no alternative and permit parking schemes keep the kerb side free for fully paid-up users.  But where residents’ parking isn’t an issue, charging delivery vans by the minute to keep the kerbside free flowing is one idea, or limiting the kerb side for car clubs so that they can conveniently leave their vehicles where people can access them is another. 

Professor Donald Shoup of UCLA drew our attention to New York where there are 20 people for every parking space.  If there were 20 shared vehicles more people could access one, but are we the sharing type?  Car clubs are becoming more popular in places like London (some 600,000 registered members) and fewer young people are learning to drive so the idea that the car is a rite of passage may be outdated now.

As for enforcement for parking contraventions, England and Wales implement a variable pricing policy depending on the seriousness.  For a first ‘offence’ the professor suggested a warning is issued and subsequent infringements incur a higher price, perhaps doubling each time, the incentive of course being to encourage good behaviour and not continue violating parking laws.  Our own research finds that the vast majority of people do recognise that enforcement is necessary, but it is never a popular subject!

We are again back to talking about prices, but for change to happen there must be a reason to do it.  Here’s what happened when San Francisco implemented a variable charging trial by raising and lowering parking charges every 3 months to see whether it would cut congestion.  The results of the study showed that the response to variable pricing just moved the cars around; high price areas being unpopular and low price, popular.  Unless we change the mode of travel, congestion will remain.

It does seem as if the future is anti-car, but cars were not banned from Copenhagen just charged more for the privilege and in the UK during 2020 as many people gave up a car as bought one.  The growth in car sharing clubs shows that people still need access to a car, but probably don’t want the cost of buying or maintaining it.  None of this is obvious however, as any savings or trade-offs made are personal and private.  Clean air zones and workplace levy schemes for example don’t explicitly reward non-car users even though everyone benefits from less congestion and cleaner air. 

However, the time is right to deal with climate change and reduce emissions.  Transport has taken a predictable trajectory so far, but external factors have shown us that we can adapt and accelerate what may have taken many decades to reach under normal cost of living pressures.  Resistance to change is inevitable, even Copenhagen wasn’t immune, but as many of our town centres have been pedestrianised, for these places at least, finding free on-street parking already means a trade-off in walking further.  Elsewhere, pushing the car park just that little bit further away so the walk is just that little bit longer will not be a drastic transformation.  Besides, one does have to walk around a retail park, so why not a town?

Charging delivery vans for the kerbside ‘kiss’ would boost funds for a greener and more pleasant walk or cycle and at the same time we still get to enjoy our internet home deliveries.  Now that doesn’t sound like a bad trade-off at all.