Smeed Report
Encyclopedia
The Smeed Report was a study into alternative methods of charging for road use, commissioned by the UK government between 1962 and 1964. The report stopped short of an unqualified recommendation for road pricing
but concluded that it could work and should be considered for congested road networks.
It was named after R. J. Smeed
, the deputy director of the British Transport and Road Research Laboratory
, who headed the team that studied the feasibility of charging motorists for using congested road networks.
The report
was written by a body of 11 economists and engineers, including Michael Edwin Beesley,
a pioneer of Cost Benefit Analysis techniques whose key innovation was the valuation that people give to their time
, and Gabriel Roth
, a noted road transport economist. Smeed was also a noted statistician and transport planner
: he identified Smeed's law
that describes motorists' tolerance towards speed and risk. He observed that drivers would not go out if traffic speeds fell below 9 mph; but if speeds rose, more would drive until they caused more congestion.
The report suggested alternatives to the system of road taxation and user benefits that was in use at the time and was based largely on the results of the 1933 Salter Report
into road and rail transportation.
, 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.
The principles laid down were that "The road user should pay the costs that he imposes upon others", namely the following:
The operational requirements should be the following:
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.
, which had commissioned it: the Ministry reported in June 1964 that it would first need to study the implications and thus the government was "therefore in no way committed to this form of restraint". It initially withheld release of the full report to the public and took its time to consider it. It was rumoured that the Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas Home, had suggested to "take a vow that if we are re-elected we will never again set up a study like this one".
Events took over, and two elections were fought in 1964
and 1966
with transport as a major election issue, resulting in a new Wilson
government with Barbara Castle
as Minister of Transport
. A large majority enabled her to bring into law a number of the then-controversial safety concepts that the RRL had been investigating, such as speed limits and breathalyzer
s. She appeared to become an advocate of road pricing per the Smeed Report and publicly criticised the construction of new urban motorways as "self-defeating", during a tour of US cities, slowing down the UK's future urban road building programme as a consequence.
However, the political will needed to establish such a scheme seemed to be slipping away, and commitment atrophied in the UK as the minister requested more feasibility reports, until, in 1970, the government changed and the scheme effectively died.
The Smeed committee members had already become frustrated and moved on. In 1966, Smeed was appointed Professor of Traffic Studies at University College London (UCL) and formed the then Research Group in Traffic Studies, which grew to become the present Centre for Transport Studies at UCL within the University of London Centre for Transport Studies. The chair of the parallel and quasi-competing committee, Professor Sir Colin Buchanan took up a post as professor of transport at Imperial College in 1963. Roth acrimoniously left the country to join the World Bank
in 1967, citing the delays and the mutation of the pricing scheme from an enabling investment-raising mechanism into a method of restriction.
It remained influential elsewhere, with economist Maurice Allais
following up this work in 1965 with a report for the EEC
that recommended rail and road privatisation to allow the operation of free market forces across Europe's roads and railways, and with the Adam Smith Institute
who encouraged Roth to revisit his earlier analysis in 1992, when he noted that "the idea of charging for the use of congested roads is still hypersensitive, and many politicians avoid the subject studiously."
Although Singapore
adopted Smeed's approach (after Roth analysed its congestion problems for the World Bank
) it was not until 2002 that the principle was re-adopted in Britain, with legislation passed to allow the first schemes to be implemented in Durham
and then London
, with consideration given to a national road pricing system.
Research by the likes of Lewis and Mogridge
were better able to formulate the observation that the more roads are built, the more traffic there is to fill these roads. Combined with the visible effects of growing levels of traffic, this developed the intellectual argument upon which to consider introducing new methods of charging.
Perhaps the biggest change relates to the method of charging and collection, as the available technologies have changed over time. Thus the Durham scheme uses an automated toll booth,
while London uses a remote system based on CCTV and automatic number plate recognition
.
As predicted, the costs of tracking and billing are very large; for the remote monitoring of the London scheme the majority of the income raised is absorbed by the costs. There are suggestions that a wireless "tag and beacon" scheme could be introduced as a potentially better and cheaper alternative.
There are no multiple zones in operation in the UK; when it was decided to extend congestion charging from central London to include the West End of London, there was some discussion about having two zones running side-by-side. However, the Western zone was introduced by simply extending the area of the earlier London zone and use the same charges and conditions for simplicity.
Although the more recent Data Protection Act now gives a framework for the responsible collection of personal data in the UK, the privacy concerns identified in the Smeed report were not addressed by the London scheme, with fears expressed over mass surveillance
and abuse of the systems.
Edinburgh seriously considered a two-cordon road pricing scheme but rejected it in 2005 after a public referendum.
Singapore has adopted many of the ideas originally identified in the Smeed Report, since introducing its first Restricted Zone in 1975.
It uses a variable Electronic Road Pricing structure on expressways and through gateways into the central business district with pricing based on time and congestion levels. It aims to reduce congestion, encourage the use of public transport, car pooling, less congested alternative routes and different times of travel.
Since 1998 it has operated through a wireless In-vehicle Unit which communicates with the overhead gantries, and makes electronic payments through an electronic CashCard.
A cordon based charging scheme has also been running in the city centre of Oslo, Norway
since 1990. However, this differs in some key respects from Smeed's scheme, as it relies on a system of 19 wireless AutoPASS
-enabled entrypoints with toll booths, and it was not designed as a congestion charge. Instead it is a hypothecated
tax or fund-raising mechanism to pay for new roads, in the first instance, and public transport more latterly.
Road pricing
Road pricing is an economic concept regarding the various direct charges applied for the use of roads. The road charges includes fuel taxes, licence fees, parking taxes, tolls, and congestion charges, including those which may vary by time of day, by the specific road, or by the specific vehicle...
but concluded that it could work and should be considered for congested road networks.
It was named after R. J. Smeed
Reuben Smeed
Reuben Jacob Smeed was a British statistician and transport researcher.He obtained a degree in mathematics and PhD in aeronautical engineering from Queen Mary's College before entering academia as a teacher of mathematics....
, the deputy director of the British Transport and Road Research Laboratory
Transport Research Laboratory
TRL is a British transport consultancy and research organisation based at Wokingham Berkshire with approximately 500 staff. TRL is owned by the Transport Research Foundation , which is overseen by 80 sector members from the transport industry. TRL also own small UK regional offices situated in...
, who headed the team that studied the feasibility of charging motorists for using congested road networks.
The report
was written by a body of 11 economists and engineers, including Michael Edwin Beesley,
a pioneer of Cost Benefit Analysis techniques whose key innovation was the valuation that people give to their time
Value of time
In transport economics, the value of time is the opportunity cost of the time that a traveller spends on his/her journey. In essence, this makes it the amount that a traveller would be willing to pay in order to save time, or the amount they would accept as compensation for lost time.One of the...
, and Gabriel Roth
Gabriel Roth
Gabriel Fernando Roth is an Agentine footballer playing for Rangers.-External links: * at Terra.com.ar * at BDFA...
, a noted road transport economist. Smeed was also a noted statistician and transport planner
Transportation planning
Transportation planning is a field involved with the evaluation, assessment, design and siting of transportation facilities .-Models and Sustainability :...
: he identified Smeed's law
Smeed's law
Smeed's Law, named after R. J. Smeed, who first proposed the relationship in 1949, is an empirical rule relating traffic fatalities to traffic congestion as measured by the proxy of motor vehicle registrations and country population. Thus, increasing traffic volume leads to an increase in...
that describes motorists' tolerance towards speed and risk. He observed that drivers would not go out if traffic speeds fell below 9 mph; but if speeds rose, more would drive until they caused more congestion.
The report suggested alternatives to the system of road taxation and user benefits that was in use at the time and was based largely on the results of the 1933 Salter Report
Salter Report
The Salter Report was named after Arthur Salter, who chaired an influential conference of road and rail experts in 1932. The report directed British government policy for transport funding for decades to follow.- Railways :...
into road and rail transportation.
Conclusions
The results of the revolutionary study were reported into the then Ministry of TransportDepartment for Transport
In the United Kingdom, the Department for Transport is the government department responsible for the English transport network and a limited number of transport matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland which are not devolved...
, 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.
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 shillingShillingThe shilling is a unit of currency used in some current and former British Commonwealth countries. The word shilling comes from scilling, an accounting term that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times where it was deemed to be the value of a cow in Kent or a sheep elsewhere. The word is thought to derive...
s per hour of driving in the centre of LondonLondonLondon is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
or CambridgeCambridgeThe city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the... - costs should be stable and known in advance
- payment in advance of travel should be possible
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.
Reactions
The report was received with ambivalence by the Macmillan governmentUnited Kingdom general election, 1959
This United Kingdom general election was held on 8 October 1959. It marked a third successive victory for the ruling Conservative Party, led by Harold Macmillan...
, which had commissioned it: the Ministry reported in June 1964 that it would first need to study the implications and thus the government was "therefore in no way committed to this form of restraint". It initially withheld release of the full report to the public and took its time to consider it. It was rumoured that the Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas Home, had suggested to "take a vow that if we are re-elected we will never again set up a study like this one".
Events took over, and two elections were fought in 1964
United Kingdom general election, 1964
The United Kingdom general election of 1964 was held on 15 October 1964, more than five years after the preceding election, and thirteen years after the Conservative Party had retaken power...
and 1966
United Kingdom general election, 1966
The 1966 United Kingdom general election on 31 March 1966 was called by sitting Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Wilson's decision to call an election turned on the fact that his government, elected a mere 17 months previously in 1964 had an unworkably small majority of only 4 MPs...
with transport as a major election issue, resulting in a new Wilson
Harold Wilson
James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, KG, OBE, FRS, FSS, PC was a British Labour Member of Parliament, Leader of the Labour Party. He was twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the 1960s and 1970s, winning four general elections, including a minority government after the...
government with Barbara Castle
Barbara Castle
Barbara Anne Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn , PC, GCOT was a British Labour Party politician....
as Minister of Transport
Secretary of State for Transport
The Secretary of State for Transport is the member of the cabinet responsible for the British Department for Transport. The role has had a high turnover as new appointments are blamed for the failures of decades of their predecessors...
. A large majority enabled her to bring into law a number of the then-controversial safety concepts that the RRL had been investigating, such as speed limits and breathalyzer
Breathalyzer
A breathalyzer or breathalyser is a device for estimating blood alcohol content from a breath sample...
s. She appeared to become an advocate of road pricing per the Smeed Report and publicly criticised the construction of new urban motorways as "self-defeating", during a tour of US cities, slowing down the UK's future urban road building programme as a consequence.
However, the political will needed to establish such a scheme seemed to be slipping away, and commitment atrophied in the UK as the minister requested more feasibility reports, until, in 1970, the government changed and the scheme effectively died.
The Smeed committee members had already become frustrated and moved on. In 1966, Smeed was appointed Professor of Traffic Studies at University College London (UCL) and formed the then Research Group in Traffic Studies, which grew to become the present Centre for Transport Studies at UCL within the University of London Centre for Transport Studies. The chair of the parallel and quasi-competing committee, Professor Sir Colin Buchanan took up a post as professor of transport at Imperial College in 1963. Roth acrimoniously left the country to join the World Bank
World Bank
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programmes.The World Bank's official goal is the reduction of poverty...
in 1967, citing the delays and the mutation of the pricing scheme from an enabling investment-raising mechanism into a method of restriction.
It remained influential elsewhere, with economist Maurice Allais
Maurice Allais
Maurice Félix Charles Allais was a French economist, and was the 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources."...
following up this work in 1965 with a report for the EEC
EEC
EEC is an abbreviation that usually refers to the European Economic Community, the forerunner to the European Union.It may also refer to;* The East Erie Commercial Railroad, a shortline in Pennsylvania...
that recommended rail and road privatisation to allow the operation of free market forces across Europe's roads and railways, and with the Adam Smith Institute
Adam Smith Institute
The Adam Smith Institute, abbreviated to ASI, is a think tank based in the United Kingdom, named after one of the founders of modern economics, Adam Smith. It espouses free market and classical liberal views, in particular by creating radical policy options in the light of public choice theory,...
who encouraged Roth to revisit his earlier analysis in 1992, when he noted that "the idea of charging for the use of congested roads is still hypersensitive, and many politicians avoid the subject studiously."
Although Singapore
Singapore Area Licensing Scheme
The Singapore Area Licensing Scheme , introduced in 1975, charged drivers entering downtown Singapore, and thereby aimed to manage traffic demand. This was the first urban traffic congestion pricing scheme to be successfully implemented in the world...
adopted Smeed's approach (after Roth analysed its congestion problems for the World Bank
World Bank
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programmes.The World Bank's official goal is the reduction of poverty...
) it was not until 2002 that the principle was re-adopted in Britain, with legislation passed to allow the first schemes to be implemented in Durham
Durham City congestion charge
The Durham City congestion charge was the first congestion charge to be introduced in the UK in October 2002.Durham County Council introduced the toll for drivers using 1,000-year-old Saddler Street in the city centre which stands on the peninsula above the River Wear. This is the only public...
and then London
London congestion charge
The London congestion charge is a fee charged for some categories of motor vehicle to travel at certain times within the Congestion Charge Zone , a traffic area in London. The charge aims to reduce congestion, and raise investment funds for London's transport system...
, with consideration given to a national road pricing system.
Research by the likes of Lewis and Mogridge
Lewis-Mogridge Position
The Lewis–Mogridge Position, named after D. Lewis and M. J. H. Mogridge, was formulated in 1990. It captures the observation that the more roads are built, the more traffic there is to fill these roads. Speed gains from some new roads can disappear within months if not weeks...
were better able to formulate the observation that the more roads are built, the more traffic there is to fill these roads. Combined with the visible effects of growing levels of traffic, this developed the intellectual argument upon which to consider introducing new methods of charging.
Comparison with today's schemes
Most of the features and considerations identified in the Smeed Report were consistent with those of the British congestion charging schemes implemented 40 years later.Perhaps the biggest change relates to the method of charging and collection, as the available technologies have changed over time. Thus the Durham scheme uses an automated toll booth,
while London uses a remote system based on CCTV and automatic number plate recognition
Automatic number plate recognition
Automatic number plate recognition is a mass surveillance method that uses optical character recognition on images to read the license plates on vehicles. They can use existing closed-circuit television or road-rule enforcement cameras, or ones specifically designed for the task...
.
As predicted, the costs of tracking and billing are very large; for the remote monitoring of the London scheme the majority of the income raised is absorbed by the costs. There are suggestions that a wireless "tag and beacon" scheme could be introduced as a potentially better and cheaper alternative.
There are no multiple zones in operation in the UK; when it was decided to extend congestion charging from central London to include the West End of London, there was some discussion about having two zones running side-by-side. However, the Western zone was introduced by simply extending the area of the earlier London zone and use the same charges and conditions for simplicity.
Although the more recent Data Protection Act now gives a framework for the responsible collection of personal data in the UK, the privacy concerns identified in the Smeed report were not addressed by the London scheme, with fears expressed over mass surveillance
Mass surveillance
Mass surveillance is the pervasive surveillance of an entire population, or a substantial fraction thereof.Modern governments today commonly perform mass surveillance of their citizens, explaining that they believe that it is necessary to protect them from dangerous groups such as terrorists,...
and abuse of the systems.
Edinburgh seriously considered a two-cordon road pricing scheme but rejected it in 2005 after a public referendum.
Singapore has adopted many of the ideas originally identified in the Smeed Report, since introducing its first Restricted Zone in 1975.
It uses a variable Electronic Road Pricing structure on expressways and through gateways into the central business district with pricing based on time and congestion levels. It aims to reduce congestion, encourage the use of public transport, car pooling, less congested alternative routes and different times of travel.
Since 1998 it has operated through a wireless In-vehicle Unit which communicates with the overhead gantries, and makes electronic payments through an electronic CashCard.
A cordon based charging scheme has also been running in the city centre of Oslo, Norway
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
since 1990. However, this differs in some key respects from Smeed's scheme, as it relies on a system of 19 wireless AutoPASS
Autopass
Autopass is an electronic toll collection system used in Norway. It allows collecting road tolls automatically from cars...
-enabled entrypoints with toll booths, and it was not designed as a congestion charge. Instead it is a hypothecated
Hypothecation (taxation)
The hypothecation of a tax is the dedication of the revenue from a specific tax for a particular expenditure purpose. Hypothecation is the pledging of assets....
tax or fund-raising mechanism to pay for new roads, in the first instance, and public transport more latterly.