INDUSTRY & RESEARCH
campusreview.com.au
Pay as you drive?
Jamye Harrison and Russell King. Photo: Clearways Mobility
A UNSW professor is proposing a road usage
scheme that rewards smart driving behaviour
and allows drivers to opt out of paying fuel tax.
Jamye Harrison interviewed by Gemma Purves
J
amye Harrison, an adjunct professor in the Faculty of
Engineering at the University of New South Wales, and
business partner Russell King are the first non-UK entrants to
be shortlisted for the Wolfson Economics Prize.
Since the £250,000 ($430,000) prize – funded by Lord Simon
Wolfson – was first awarded in 2012, it has asked entrants to provide
solutions to a variety of public policy issues. The latest question, one
of pressing concern for anyone living in a large city, asks: “How can
we pay for better, safer, more reliable roads in a way that is fair to
road users and good for the economy and the environment?”
While a number of finalists opted for a stick approach to road
use, Harrison and King, the founders of tech startup Clearways,
went with a carrot approach. Using their experience in the public
and private sector, they came up with an innovative package that
entirely rethinks how to generate ongoing road funding.
One reason roads are increasingly underfunded despite increasing
use is the change in vehicle technology. Not only are cars more fuel
efficient, but the fuel is often a petrol/biofuel mix, with the biofuel
component taxed at a significantly lower rate. Combined with the
rise of hybrids and electric vehicles (EVs), as well as the increasing
likelihood of the future ubiquity of autonomous vehicles, it is easy to
see why it’s an issue for governments.
Harrison sits down with Campus Review to discuss his work.
CR: Can you explain how you came up with the idea of ‘pay as you
drive’, as opposed to ‘pay as you go’?
JH : Most of the submissions stem from road pricing or road user
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charging. Our perspective on this, we feel, is different in a couple
of areas.
The first point I make is that road pricing or road user charging
is something that has been very well studied and documented in
academic literature and various research studies, not only over many
years but many decades. As far as a concept, price signalling, the
concept of demand management not just supply, which is increasing
the supply of road space, has been very well studied but never really
put into practice, as far as broad-based road pricing is concerned.
Our perspective is that the key impediment to introducing road
pricing is one of an acceptable political pathway. It's not something
that has been palatable to any government over a long period in
terms of addressing congestion, let alone road funding. Russell and
I first focused on establishing an acceptable political pathway for
road pricing, then some commercial and technology innovation to
back that up.
What we've got is something called Customer Led Demand
Management: a system of road pricing that is attractive to road
users, and has several benefits. It's all about incentivising smart
driving behaviour – for example, travelling outside of the peak, or
moving from car or road traffic to public transport or other means
of transport. It's about incentivising smart choices, not penalising
congestion-causing behaviour.
How are you going to incentivise people to move onto the ‘pay as
you drive’ scheme you are proposing?
There is an important backdrop to all of this – there are two or
three major trends that need to be considered. They fall across
three horizons.
There is the here and now, which is congestion. Increasing
urbanisation and population growth in, pretty much, any country
are the key drivers to increasing traffic congestion. Obviously that
plays out differently in different cities depending on uptake of
public transport and so forth.