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M6 Toll unease

2003-12-14

Matt Webb.

Some notes/a clarification of my first post about the M6 Toll on Interconnected in response to some email comments.

So, two motorways with common origin and endpoint, and the same length: one is pay-for and 45 minutes faster to drive.

I've had a few comments about this, I'll try and address some of those here. Phil Gyford and Clay Shirky both pointed me to the Paris Metro Pricing model [as PDF] as a good comparison: first class and standard class have identical features but different prices, which reduces the passenger number and hence introduces the benefit. I'll come back to this minimally differentiated service in a bit.

Roads don't just benefit the people who drive on them. The locations they bring closer benefit also from trade and the movement of people; consumers benefit from cheaper freight. Good roads have regional and nations effects. So in the first instance I think roads fall into that category of shared investments - like health, education, defence - where the individual and societal outcomes are highly meshed, and so funding should come from those usual sources (how progressive, regional or whatever these taxes are is another story).

But if there's going to be a toll, what then? If there was just one road and everyone was charged and that paid back the investment -- that's okay so long as the amount isn't so much so to cause people to choose not to drive. I don't want to impact choice. If it's low enough, it doesn't matter if you're rich or poor: the money-cost is negligible next to the time-cost of driving; rich people aren't going to spend all their money driving up and down the road all day. (But if the cost was significant, that would be a different story. In that case I'd ask that the rich paid more, as they do when funding comes from taxes, and as they do already when travel is part-paid in time and opportunity cost.)

But two roads, one of which is toll? Surely if some people want to pay and have a quicker trip and thereby fund this extra road - which as I've said benefits everyone whether they drive it or not - why shouldn't they? This is a really hard question for me; it's not an instance of a general case. It's something to do very particularly with the nature of roads, of value and money, of funding (and how it extends to, eg, internet pricing policy or as a general mechanism for resolving distribution of rivalrous goods -- I'll have to think about that.) So, some points.

• The cost trickles out anyway. The benefits in bringing places closer are paid for with each toll, and this cost is transferred outwards (a business will have to pay a greater wage - to include the toll - to employ a person, if they're doing so just because they're closer. This business cost will get added to the cost of whatever services they supply). So the benefits of the motorway are no longer diffused around it as much, and - perversely - the toll choice starts confining the benefits only to those who are actually travelling.
• A value transaction isn't just a magical movement of cash, it's a vector, it's momentum. A payment carries with it force beyond an exchange of coins. The second-order effects worry me: there's a disincentive for the authorities to maintain and improve the non-toll M6 because that would reduce the toll income. There's an incentive to spend the toll income on persuading the government the investment loan shouldn't be repaid in full. There's an incentive (because the duty is now to the directly tolled, not the taxpayer) not to invest in noise baffling or environmental verges or runoff filtering. In the long-term there's an incentive to lower the toll to the point where all it pays for is the toll collection infrastructure itself. Then the only people who really benefit are the operators. (For the momentum of transactions, look at how cinemas have 20 minutes of advertising before the film. There's a cycle: a service is provided (sans advertising) and a niche accidentally created. The niche is used for adverts and the service provider now serves two masters. The with-advertising model drives the sans-advertising model out of business (it's cheaper), and the advertisers can reduce their payments; the service now cannot operate without advertising. Advertising is locked in, more than the consumer would choose, and anyway the consumer no longer has a choice.)
• Since the per-journey cost has to be large enough to affect a change in some choices - a constraint which isn't present for universal tolling - it will naturally be at a higher level such that the effective cost is larger for the poor than for the rich. Then:
  • For a section of the population this reduces choice - some people are always going to make the pragmatic decision to sit in traffic longer -- and this is what I referred to before as undemocratic. Democracy isn't just about choice, it's about increasing the franchise, about letting more people affect the world around them with the incidental choices they make every day. This does the reverse.
  • The better-off can afford to buy more time. More time for risk-taking, for earning, for networking. Building a toll-choice road calcifies the benefits of wealth into the infrastructure, meaning that if you're rich you can buy the opportunity to get richer. Not a new thing in the world, I know, but not something I like. (And yes, having rich people is good because they spend money, but I'd prefer to have the opportunity open to everyone.)
  • There's a choice that has to be made every time there's the opportunity to not-spend (or save, or earn) money at the cost of some intangible benefit (time-with-the-family; stress). Wealth now or long-term? The rich can afford to make this decision, to risk not getting richer; the poor can't. Commuting is indeed a public ill. People should be able to socialise (or sit on their own, if they want) rather than have to sit in traffic. But to only give people who can afford to make that choice the benefits of potentially higher social capital -- I don't like it.

I'm going too far maybe. Would the road have been built without the toll? Well is it worth it or not? The toll-funded road ignores a lot of the cost the state incurs, but the state takes on those costs for a reason.

The M6 Toll moves the people who can afford to off the free M6 and provides capacity: the free M6 will end up just as busy as before, but with different people, and the democratic franchise will indeed have expanded, and there will all the good consequences of freer movement as before.

Well, then it's down to preference. Where would you prefer the franchise to be? I'd prefer we didn't have tiers of education or of health, but given we do we do our best -- but that's no reason to introduce more systems like that. Note I wouldn't apply the same arguments to restaurants, say, but would to public seating, and this is because the benefits of public seating are to a large part social - having people sitting in public benefits the public space - and so individuals shouldn't be allowed to pay a significant amount for priority treatment. What they're actually getting is empty capacity at all time, which is an unmeasurable social ill, and like all unmeasurable properties isn't properly charged for (think of environmental pollution in less recent times).

I don't like the message that social infrastructure can be owned, and I don't like it that the payment can start a cascade which concentrates on one quality of the infrastructure (the travel time) to the detriment of others: rival routes, local noise and so on.

The Paris Metro Pricing worked on the Paris Metro because it was a self-contained system: having people travel on the less empty carriages didn't adversely affect group processes on the fuller ones (because they were full enough), and because of mass production there was a disincentive to make the first class carriages any different to standard class. The benefits were confined to the journey itself (more comfortable, but not quicker) and the environmental side-effects weren't possible.

The M6s, on the other hand - and it is a very specific set of circumstances - cause me unease.

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