All I Want for Christmas Is Integrated Transportation Planning and Pricing
Transportation challenges are increasingly complex and interrelated, so why do we keep trying to solve them in isolation using the same old tools?
This article is Part I of a series where ClearRoad will look at how we might use road pricing creatively to address the myriad transportation-related issues that we face. Written with lots of support from ClearRoad co-founder Paul Salama
It is now nine months since the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. In that time, cities and citizens worldwide have wrestled through a deluge of changes, with the situation remaining precarious. The shock has extended beyond current systems’ ability to respond and adapt. With so much still in flux, the need for agile approaches capable of responding to future changes and uncertainty has never been greater.
A closer look at the collective pandemic response reveals that our transportation problems relate and intersect with many other societal issues — climate change and environmental pollution, inequity, underfunded public infrastructure — yet responding to these problems and issues is severely hampered by the siloed and disjointed systems and lines of thinking currently in place. Rather than responding to the pandemic’s effects strategically and holistically through concepts like multisolving to address the multiplicity of challenges, solutions have been deployed in reactive, one-off “band-aid” fashion. Although well-intentioned, this haphazard patchwork has given our transportation management systems a quality akin to Frankenstein’s monster — big, bulky, unsightly, and likely to lead to a tragic ending.
We’ve Created a Monster: Our patchwork of Transportation Agencies & Solutions
During the pandemic, the monster we’ve created through our patchwork transportation solutions really started coming to life.
In the initial round of lockdowns, as most transitioned to work-from-home, streets were empty except for the most essential workers. Some cities and states responded by providing frontline workers the option to apply for toll reimbursements, requiring them to submit receipts as proof of payment, amounting to extra paperwork for the already overburdened workers. In other locations, tolls were waived altogether, a move that may have compounded the pandemic’s effects on our already depleted roadway budgets.
Nowhere is this patchwork more apparent than in London. Considered to be among the best-managed and most innovative transportation systems globally, Transport for London was reduced to turning off its groundbreaking congestion charge system entirely when it couldn’t find a workable method for exempting National Health Service workers. But that isn’t the only sign of how ponderous the system is — a pandemic-delayed Ultra Low Emission Zone, expanding to an area 16 times that of the congestion charge, is anticipated to cost just short of $1 billion (£700 million) due to the massive roadside camera and sensor requirements. Meanwhile, to close a staggering budget deficit, England’s conservative party has proposed a per-mile fee for all vehicles, necessitating new in-vehicle hardware. Of course, this would be separate from the toll tags for travel on England’s highways that vehicles already carry.
Running Out of Options
Current transportation trends should worry city officials everywhere. While current travel patterns appear more idiosyncratic and just downright confusing, traffic has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels in many places. These patterns are despite formerly vibrant downtown commuting destinations now being more akin to ghost towns; a concerning observation considering environmental consequences of large swaths of the public shifting from public transit to private vehicle use.
Last month we highlighted public transit systems’ emaciated budgets, but the forecast has only grown more dire with warnings of severe, doomsday transit service cuts “debilitating the major economic centers of activity in the U.S.” The first to be impacted by these cuts are those who rely on public transit the most; Those with little to no other means of transportation or no option to work-from-home like those in the knowledge economy.
The deep budget cuts in state and local governments translate to deferred, scaled-down, or canceled road, bridge, and sidewalk projects. These delays translate directly to poorer mobility and access, leading to a more laggard economic recovery. The highway trust fund’s insolvency was well established prior to the pandemic. Still, even with a second stimulus package near, the only solution being discussed to address future shortfalls is to push the federal government for future stimulus rounds. (Though the presumptive Treasury Secretary’s prior embrace of VMT fees is heartening!).
Similarly, the pre-pandemic ride-hailing and online shopping transformation was already putting pressure on roads and traffic patterns and was projected to increase congestion and CO2 emissions in cities. After almost a decade, cities were finally exploring novel techniques for regulating transportation network companies (TNCs) like Uber. COVID lockdowns have forced TNCs to take up new operating models, seeing food delivery services outpace their core ridership service. The added congestion and pollution expected from this pandemic-accelerated trend is yet another piece in our patchwork transportation monster that will come for us post-COVID.
Learning from the Pandemic
With the buzz of vaccines anticipated for the coming months, it’s comforting to expect our transportation sector to return to normal. However, the transportation monster, mostly ignored during the pandemic, will again rear its ugly head, dragging many of its adjacent environmental, equity, and funding issues with it.
The pandemic’s impacts have rippled across every segment of our transportation system & economy, accelerating mobility trends beyond any forecast model. It has revealed the patchwork underpinnings of our disorganized transportation systems and solutions. Frustratingly, many of the policy tools and solutions to deal with most of these challenges already exist in isolation. But, governments continue to fail to, first, fit those pieces together to “multisolve” problems synchronously and comprehensively, and second, adopt systems and processes that allow for the agile implementation of these solutions in the first place. Addressing both failures is crucial in the face of continued uncertainty.
Fitting the pieces together through Road Pricing
Road pricing can be a platform for integrating across the formerly “disjointed” transportation segments and solutions through price signaling. Leveraging the existing data and technology in vehicles, governments are, with ClearRoad’s Road Pricing Platform, finally able to fit all of the pieces problem and solution pieces together. Through creative policy and pricing implementations enabled by ClearRoad’s platform, governments can, for example, seamlessly respond to changing delivery trends and peak-travel patterns, rapidly implement toll exemption for essential workers, and sustainably address their budgetary shortfalls with a single platform.
Flexibility is of tantamount importance to ensure that no matter what changes are brought about by the pandemic or future shocks to the transportation status quo, our solutions do not need to be siloed or lag behind with bulky, analog, or haphazard one-off implementations.
Can the pandemic’s enduring legacy be a transition to integrated transportation solutions? How might governments piece together their competing needs through the ClearRoad platform and road pricing? Stay tuned for Part II in this series, where we will explore how vehicle segmentation and pricing can be joined in innovative ways to develop an endless variety of transportation and policy solutions.
