The frustrating impact of traffic congestion on our time has been known for some time. However, there is a hidden cost to traffic congestion that shows gridlock on our roads is more than just an inconvenience on our time. It drains our wallets, our economies, as well as our physical and mental health.
Back in 2016, we had an online “Frustration calculator” that quantifies your level of frustration based on the distance of your journey, average speed and time lost in traffic and gives you an example of what you might have achieved in the hours lost to gridlock. They call it “road rage” for a reason. Few modern experiences are more exasperating than being trapped in a traffic jam.
So what are we supposed to do? Should we really relish in the pain we feel every day as we travel our own personal highway to hell as a sign of economic bliss, even if it comes with its own hidden tax? Whatever the solutions may be, extra capacity through better transit and autonomous vehicle technology, coordinated signal timing of traffic lights using real-time data, navigation apps and in-car solutions that help people move between modes of transportation as traffic conditions merit, we will not unclog key roads by adding road kilometres alone. Time and again, it has not worked. If traffic congestion continues to increase as studies seem to indicate, the 10-day long traffic jams in China and two/three-hour daily commutes drivers face in São Paulo, Brazil could become a reality for us drivers on this little, over-populated rock in the not-so distant future.
Instead, we need to take steps to adjust driver demand for travel to congested areas. Traffic delays prompt most Maltese drivers to think about how they can circumvent the gridlock and travel more efficiently. The common solution used to combat most traffic problems is to increase supply or the number of possible options available to get from Point A to Point B. The first difficulty is that when towns and villages are good at producing travel, people will travel more. That leads to extra congestion.
Indeed, is any activity in Malta more pervasive than car travel? Cars, car payments, repairs and fuel swallow a substantial part of an average Maltese household budget. The average driver spends several hours per day on the road. As a nation, statistics show that Malta spends a huge amount of money squeezed out of our taxes annually on road construction and maintenance.
Experience has shown that neither additional traffic lanes nor more widely available mass transit have ever alleviated traffic congestion. If localities build more capacity, additional drivers take to the roads until congestion returns to previous levels. In other words, the benefits of new lanes, tunnels, flyovers and other major road projects are negligible. Urban and suburban drivers alike naturally flock to roads that are less travelled. Basically, if you double the amount of road, the speed of traffic will go up proportionately. Nor does more public transit alleviate traffic congestion to the degree that many have suggested. If you manage to convince some drivers to give up on their cars, other drivers will replace them. There is no relationship between public transport and road travel. But that is not what people who promote public transport usually say.
The potential for real gains, however, lies in managing travel demand, an alternative that drivers often resist and politicians are wary of legislating. For example, shopping outings are usually short trips, while commuting to work often takes longer. The process yields a more refined measure of speed in urban areas, taking into account that traffic congestion will induce drivers to make different choices, like going to a neighbourhood store instead of a more remote shopping centre.
If not more roads and mass transit, what solutions can ease traffic congestion in a meaningful way with net economic benefit? All possible and theoretical solutions would most probably be very unpopular with motorists. Take congestion taxes or surcharges for highly travelled roads or during peak times of the day. Cities including London, Stockholm and Singapore have already successfully instituted such policies in spite of being highly unpopular with car owners.
If policymakers want to ease traffic congestion in a meaningful, prolonged way, planners must find ways to adjust demand. A congestion tax could certainly transform some of that pure loss into resources for the government. In turn, local government could use some of that revenue to provide a better travel experience for those who have been led to abandon their cars. Executed well, it is a win for nearly all concerned. One sure thing is that congestion pricing works. If you impose a price for drivers to drive on a road, they will react to that.
Our policy-makers fail to appreciate that a congestion tax imposes less burden than implicit taxes levied on cars sitting in traffic wasting time and fuel and spewing greenhouse gases. I am one of those who do not oppose all road construction. Bottlenecks tie up traffic, for instance, and new roads around them often move vehicles more swiftly. Every project is different. I am not saying that nothing should be built anywhere but, lately, we have built too many roads in too short a time.
Our future roads should no longer be built with concrete as much as they should be built with software. The underutilised availability of real-time traffic data today also opens up new avenues for industry and government to tackle the never-ending, drive-time problem. Our government has the opportunity, through smart city applications and services, to harness the power of real-time insight and predictive analytics to build robust intelligence into Malta’s transportation networks.
Until then, we can sit idly by debating the individual, economic and environmental costs of traffic congestion or we can accept the fact that regardless of how you measure it, the implications of following the status quo are just too big to ignore. Let us stop the debate and start applying what we have learned from building the information superhighway in the virtual to building smarter transportation networks in the real one.
Dr Mark Said is an advocate