97. Who pays for transport, and who benefits from it?_TMBTP

"In every instance ... the user is paying. They're either paying by getting up early, by walking much further, or they're paying in frustration in looking for the perfect park and there's a time penalty you can translate directly into dollars”. Who pays for transport, and who benefits from it? In this episode of This Must Be The Place, Liz is joined over lunch by transport researchers Laura Aston, Nicholas Fournier and Knowles Tivendale to discuss equity in transport pricing. Lunch isn’t free, but getting around sometimes is – or at least it seems to be, for some people. Talking tickets, tolls and time are Laura Aston (http://publictransportresearchgroup.info/our-team/research-students/laura-aston/): a PhD Candidate from Monash’s Public Transport Research Group. Nick Fournier (http://publictransportresearchgroup.info/our-team/staff/nick-fournier/) is a research fellow at PTRG who recently moved to Melbourne after finishing his PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, on multi-model travel decision making and equity. Knowles Tivendale is Director of consulting firm Movement & Place (https://www.movementandplace.com.au/), and a lecturer and associate of PTRG. Why was congestion charging successful in London but not Manchester? Why was congestion pricing so appealing in Stockholm that the public voted for it at a referendum after a successful trial? Why do Melbourne’s toll-roads differ in their model of who pays? Are transit users the only beneficiaries of public transport infrastructure? The episode ponders the principles and practicalities of how mobility costs and benefits are distributed, and what this might mean for Colac (a town that, for some reason, comes up a lot). Re: parking, Knowles suggests “there are times when the demand is so light that free access is fine…but when things get very congested, that’s clearly a time to ration the resource”. He questions whether rationing parking based on availability in time (rewarding those who get up early) is the best way to ensure fair access to the train network. Regarding CBD congestion, Nick suggests “you can move 1000 cars per hour per lane..if you’ve got more people than that moving through, then they probably shouldn’t be in cars, they should be walking”. Nick also brings a US perspective, highlighting some surprising differences in the way the US funds highways, contracts public transport, manages congestion and deals with commercial vehicles. Nick argues transport pricing needs to be nuanced, offer alternatives and “not just gouge people”.