Smeed Report - Conclusions

Conclusions

The principles laid down were that "The road user should pay the costs that he imposes upon others", namely the following:

• road costs (construction, maintenance, lighting)
• congestion (the delay the motorist causes to others)
• social costs (risk, noise, fumes)

The operational requirements should be the following:

• related to the amount of use made of the roads
• costs should vary according to the location, time, and type of vehicle
• cities should be zoned, with costs raising to 10 shillings per hour of driving in the centre of London or Cambridge
• costs should be stable and known in advance
• payment in advance of travel should be possible

The results of the revolutionary study were reported into the then Ministry of Transport, indicating that the effect of speeding up congested traffic would benefit the country's economy by £100–£150M per annum. It would be possible and feasible to impose car user restraint strategies by charging through the metering of road usage, if the government had the will to do so.

Charging zones would be identified by clear signs on their boundaries; these could be electrical and thus be changed at various times of the day. A simple national colour-coded scheme could be used to indicate the charge rate in force at that time or to allow different charging zones to exist side-by side.

They recognised that traditional toll collection methods would not be practical in city centres, where the road layout had not been designed to provide natural gateways into the tow, and where the demolition and land required for toll booths or toll plazas would be unacceptable.

Instead, they investigated charging through a daily licence system, managed either by a remote wireless automatic identification of the vehicle, or by a meter mounted inside the vehicle, which could track both driving charges and parking.

They recommended a tamper-proof credit or pre-payment meter inside the car, as with the technology available at the time, any external recording mechanism would require expensive equipment for tracking and book keeping and threaten the privacy of the vehicle users they tracked. A single metering system could be used in any British city centre that chose to adopt a charging zones.

There was also an economic analysis that showed that the largest part of the economic benefit from road pricing was not in the relief of congestion but in the revenue collected, which would only be released when the revenue is used. In the arguments that followed, the good that could come about by using the money from such a scheme was frequently overshadowed by a vision of the restraints and penalties levied on the motorist.