(They printed my article as a letter, which is OK)
http://news.scotsman.com/archive.cfm?id=128912005
Threat of gridlock is a hollow one
EDINBURGH faces a vote on congestion charging. Will you vote for a charge to enter the country’s capital city? I certainly wouldn’t.
The congestion charging advocates have not thought it through properly: their threat of gridlock is false.
The powers that be tell us that if we don’t act there will be "gridlock", but strangely they never show any examples of all the other gridlocked cities elsewhere. Why is this? The truth is that there aren’t any.
Time is valuable. If a journey takes too long, we don’t go at all or we seek an alternative. In other words if congestion rises then we avoid it.
Conversely, if congestion falls then we are more likely to have time to travel.
Suppose it took you four hours to drive to work, and another four hours to drive home again. What would you do? Change your job? Travel by a different means? Move house?
One thing is for sure - you wouldn’t sit in traffic for eight hours every day. You would find an alternative.
So more congestion leads to less traffic, which leads to less congestion, and less congestion leads to more traffic, which leads to more congestion.
It’s a self-balancing, self-limiting, self-regulating seesaw. When kept free of interference the road network maintains a reasonable balance between delay and throughput by virtue of normal human behaviour.
If a congestion charge is introduced, those with least cash will be discouraged from travelling. The roads will have less traffic and flow more efficiently, but this won’t last long because other people with more money will take full advantage of the improved conditions. If it takes less time to travel then road users who were previously time-constrained will again choose to travel.
They tell us that nationally congestion costs £20 billion per year. Now that’s a congestion charge if ever there was one. Why isn’t it working?
Paul Smith, Safe Speed road safety campaign, Trace House, Clay of Allan, Fearn near Tain, Ross-shire
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