On Thursday, I attended NREL’s Energy Analysis seminar, which this week featured Todd Littmann of Canada’s Victoria Transport Policy Institute, on Win-Win Transportation Solutions.
As an economist focused on policy, Todd Littman Image may be NSFW.
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has done a lot fo thinking about what are the costs to society of transport, and what sorts of perverse incentives are there that are making these costs much higher than they would be otherwise. He has a ton of extremely interesting ideas which will be useful to reduce transportation energy use for little or no cost, by simply removing perverse incentives. I’m only going to go into a couple that I thought were most surprising or innovative here, so I urge you to read the whole paper on which his talk was based on VTPI.org.
One surprising result for me was that the greatest costs to from driving may not be the costs of gas, pollution, or global warming, but the cost of accidents, which are infrequent, but can be extremely expensive. Even before adding in additional costs of congestion, wear on roads, etc., you do not need to be concerned at all about global warming to want to reduce vehicle miles traveled.
And reducing vehicle miles a is far more effective and quick way of reducing transportation energy use (as well as vehicle accidents) than improving vehicle efficiency.
He has many ideas on cost neutral ways to reduce vehicle mileage, from broadly discussed ones such as smart growth, price shifting fuel taxes, and road and congestion pricing, and he does analysis on how cost effective all of these are.
What really got me to sit up and pay attention was an I dea I had heard no where else, which was all the more interesting because he feels it is the most cost effective (in fact, cost-negative: it pays more than it costs) method of reducing vehicle use: Pay-As-You-Drive pricing. The idea is simple: instead of paying vehicle registration and auto insurance based on how long we have the car, we should pay based on how far we drive it.
Since the safest place for out vehicle is in our garage (including theft and hail damage) this makes more economic sense than the current monthly payments for auto insurance, and since the costs we place on the transport system also increase the more we drive, it also makes sense for vehicle registration fees. Because rich people with fancy cars not only tend to drive more than the poor, but because their registration fees are also already higher than those for inexpensive cars, this may even make the fees more progressive than they currently are, but some fine-tuning may be needed.
Since this is a purely regulatory reform, costs of implementation are minimal, consisting of only an annual odometer audit after the system is set up; an audit which could easily be combined with other scheduled service to minimize the cost.
According to his numbers, pay as you drive insurance and registration would average about 21 cents a mile for most people (about twice the cost of gasoline,) which I can easily see as enough to make most people think harder about how to maximize how efficiently they drive, or even consider public transport where it is an option… most public transport would become much more cost effective for people, without adding to their financial burden.
You might worry that people with long commutes and no public transportation might be unduly burdened by this shift, but we need to remember that they already pay more for auto insurance, because these are questions the auto insurance company asks. The big difference is that there would be an increased marginal cost of driving, and it is the marginal cost of an activity that has the greatest effect on behavior, not the average or total cost.
The Vattenfall Institute recently found that the cost of stabilizing the United States’s share of CO2 concentrations at 450 ppm by 2030 would actually be negative, and it’s innovative solutions like those coming out of VTPI that let us get paid to cut emissions.
What are we waiting for?
Links: Victoria Transport Planning Institute: www.vtpi.org
Win-Win Transportation Solutions
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
