Podcast: Gridlock Glasgow – Exploring Congestion Charging

This week, Hannah Randolph is joined by Josh Hampson to explore the growing conversation around congestion charging in Glasgow. With city councillors recently expressing interest in the idea, the episode dives into what such a scheme could look like and how it might align with Glasgow’s Low Emission Zone.

Drawing on examples from London, New York, and Edinburgh’s unsuccessful proposal, Hannah and Josh discuss what lessons Glasgow might learn from other cities, and unpack the potential benefits, challenges, and public reactions to congestion charging.

Timestamps

(00:23) What is congestion charging?

(02:59) Exemptions

(04:49) Similarities with low emissions zones (LEZs)

(07:10) Timing of charges

(10:26) Use of discounts & revenue

(14:54) Clyde Tunnel Toll

(16:26) Edinburgh’s failed proposal

(20:13) Other UK charges

(21:43) Effectiveness of congestion charges

(23:37) Glasgow’s public transport system

(25:57) Public attitudes

Transcript

00:00:06 Hannah Randolph

Hello and welcome back to our latest Fraser of Allander podcast. I’m Hannah Randolph, an economist here at the institute. And today I am joined by our resident transportation expert, Josh Hampson, who’s also an economist at the Fraser, to talk about the potential for congestion charging in Glasgow.

So Josh, thank you for joining me today.

To start, I’ve got a vague sense of what congestion charging is and who would pay for it, but I wonder if you can just do a brief intro. So what are congestion charges and what are they meant to do?

00:00:37 Josh Hampson

So, congestion charging. It’s a type of road pricing. So you charge the user to use specific roads. There’s a variety of different ways, so there’s amenity-based charges which people recognise as tolls, on-street parking could be classed as that.

The sort we’re talking about here is a boundary based charge. So London’s had it for a while. New York recently introduced one. Norway has quite a few. I think Singapore was one of the first countries to introduce them, where you set a boundary around your city centre or around an area that’s got really bad congestion, and then you charge anyone entering or basically crossing that boundary.

Normally a flat fee to enter and the point of it really is that particularly within dense urban areas, it can be really disruptive to expand road capacity because you have to knock down buildings, expand the roads, and so by pushing the charge on it’s more of a demand side market based intervention and the principle that underpins it is marginal social cost pricing, where without congestion charging, motorists and drivers will only face the private cost of their journey.

By attributing a cost to driving into a congested area, the social cost is then attributed to them as well, and so the point of it is that, one, you’re addressing congestion by changing scarcity on the road and you then also address sort of negative externalities, there’s pollution, noise, pollution as well, the, the people and the businesses within that, the area you’re charging have to deal with.

00:02:06 Hannah Randolph

So the whole point of it is take an area that’s really, really crowded and that makes it perhaps unpleasant to be in or, or more difficult for people who live there, and then charge people to drive in that area specifically. And then – so the idea being that some people will then choose not to drive into the city centre and will –

00:02:26 Josh Hampson

The success of them is often, how many alternatives are there to driving?

You can particularly see that when you look at different types of vehicle going in, what you see is the private vehicles tend to be a lot more elastic in their response to the charge, whereas commercial and cargo vehicles, they don’t really have another choice. You can’t really, you know, if it’s London, you can’t supply a business by the Tube, you kind of have to have a van or a lorry.

And so they don’t react as much and the point is, yeah, it will address congestion by actually putting a price on using the road.

00:02:59 Hannah Randolph

1. Yeah. And so it it would apply to everyone then. So even like you’re saying delivery vehicles and stuff like that.

00:03:05 Josh Hampson

Yeah, there are. There are exemptions. So London has a long list of them. And so sort of common ways to do it would be the residents would get 100% discount, but they might get 90% discount as they do in London because they live within the zone.

Most schemes will operate some sort of residential discount, and there’s then also a series of other exemptions. So again, in London, motorbikes are exempt because the point is the congestion is a scarcity of space in the road. Motorbikes don’t take up as much space as cars do, so by not charging motorbikes, it’s sort of, more sort of transport you want to encourage.

And then there’s a list of other ones. So recently London’s also had an ultra low emissions discount. So any, I think, it’s electric vehicles and any car that’s, any petrol car that meets the Euro 6 emission standards and, and has less than 70, sorry, Euro-4 emission standards and has less than 76 grammes of carbon dioxide get 100% discount that’s ending in 2026 and it’s falling to 25% discount because electric cars have become more, more prevalent that the scarcity argument becomes a bigger concern than the public health argument, and it sort of is similar to what low emission zones and ultra low emission zones are, however it’s slightly different. They are not about traffic management, they’re about public health and air quality.

00:04:29 Hannah Randolph

Yeah. I was gonna ask you about that, and I should, this is my fault and I should have said earlier. This is something that Glasgow’s considering, but it’s not happening. So if you were listening and you were thinking, I didn’t know! This is not in place yet and it’s still being debated whether or not they’ll do this and what it would look like, which is why we wanted to talk about it. So as you mentioned, this is kind of adjacent to a low emission zone and might be designed to kind of overlap with that idea, but that – they have very different purposes.

So we do currently have a low emission zone in Glasgow. So what would be different than about this compared to the low emission zone?

00:05:08 Josh Hampson

So the low emission zone in Glasgow is about public health, so any diesel engine that’s not beat Euro, Euro 6 emission standards and any petrol engine that’s not met Euro 4 emission standards. So basically diesel engine before 2016 or petrol engine built before 2006 are not allowed to enter low emission zone, which is basically the core of Glasgow City centre.

Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen also have them and then there’s also a series of clean air zones and low mission zones in English cities as well. In Scotland these are a prohibition on those vehicles entering. So if the vehicle doesn’t meet those standards and drives over the boundary, then an automatic number plate recognition camera will issue a penalty charge notice. In England, you’re able to pay a daily charge of £12.50 if your engine doesn’t meet those standards to enter the zone anyway.

This is how the ULEZ works in London as well, which is much bigger than just the city centre, charged like what we see with the low emission zones in Scotland. That one’s been quite contentious. It’s been described as pay to pollute in London, whereas in Scotland it is just a straight-up prohibition. What this would do is that all vehicles, and whilst there might be an environmental discount one way or another, would face a flat charge to enter the city centre.

What that charge is may vary. So right now in London, it’s a £15 daily charge. New York’s recently introduced theirs, it’s a $9 charge. When Edinburgh was considering one back in about 2005, I think, their proposal was for a £2 charge. So the extent it’s actually charged varies and it also varies a lot depending on how responsive people actually are to the price that you’re charging, but that’s obviously determined by, well, what are the alternatives? People don’t necessarily have a demand for driving, instead they’ll just have a demand for transport. If driving is the most convenient and the most affordable way that will win out.

00:06:59 Hannah Randolph

So the emission zone is banning certain types of cars from coming into the city, and congestion charge would be if you’re coming in, then anyone is is incurring this charge. And would that be all the time or is that gonna, would it be centred around peak times?

00:07:16 Josh Hampson

It generally it will be centred around daytime hours, so for London that’s from 7:00 in the morning until 6:00 at night, Monday to Friday. At weekends it’s from 12 noon until 6 at night.

New York has a 24 hour charge, but there’s peak times from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM and so basically the night time section it’s charged at 25% of what the daytime rates are. Edinburgh, when it considered its in the past, was initially, it was a 2 cordon design so there was a cordon around the city centre that would be charged from, I think it was 7 in the morning until 10 at night.

So it’s 7:00 in the morning till 7:00 at night, and then they would have an outer one that followed the entire cities ring road that was charged just at the rush hour. So from 7 till 10 and then again from 4:00 to 6:30, but that wasn’t 2 charges, that was 1 charge that during the rush hours expanded out. So you would only pay to cross the boundary once. You wouldn’t pay to enter the ring road at rush hour and then again the city centre. So the design of the times and the hours can vary and I think the reason you see New York’s being 24/7 even with a night time discount is because the MTA, the Transport Authority, New York run Subway services 24/7, whereas in London Rube services are much more limited, if at all during night times and so use of car transport becomes more important to pick up the slack there.

00:08:45 Hannah Randolph

That makes sense, and it seems like that would then encourage some people to, if they don’t have to be in town for a time sensitive reason. You could potentially delay until after afterwards or something like that, you know, go late evening or sort of earlier on a weekend and that helps maybe spread out the congestion of it.

00:09:04 Josh Hampson

Yeah, definitely. It’s, the the obvious criticism is people commuting because it’s they don’t really have a choice when they travel. Particularly where this is is, if you have shift workers, so let’s say you have a hospitality worker. They start their shift at 4:00 in the afternoon and they don’t finish till 10 at night. They’re finishing their shift after the charge has ended. But they still have to pay to drive in in the first place because they, they could use public transport to get to start their shift. They can’t use it to get home at the end of it, which means they have to take the car with them in the first place, which means they’re gonna have to pay it to get in, even if then leaving at night they wouldn’t be charged at that time. So this then relates to more some of the issues that get raised over the equity and over who should and shouldn’t exactly be charged. Something particularly is the way the taxis and private hire vehicles get charged, so licenced taxis in London black cabs are not, get 100% discount on the congestion charge. Private hire vehicles, unless they are wheelchair accessible and on a job they have to pay the fee as well. Whereas in New York all taxis and private hires are charged per trip. So rather than it being them paying the daily charge it’s a much lower rate that they pay during the peak times of – for taxis in New York, it’s $0.75 in order to cross the boundaries.

00:10:27 Hannah Randolph

Ok. And you mentioned this a little bit before, but there’s kind of a question around, should people who are resident in that particular area be excluded from the charges? So what are some of the considerations around that?

00:10:40 Josh Hampson

The considerations there are, do you want residents to have or not have vehicles? So I think particularly the failed Edinburgh scheme, there was, because the boundary extended all the way up to the city’s ring road, it would include sort of suburbs where car use is sort of encouraged by the design of the infrastructure there. And and so there was a region proposal for the £2 charge to be discounted down to 20p for residents of the city. Then with London there is people in the zone and in certain areas immediately adjacent to the congestion charge zone get a 90% discount.

And certainly with the Glasgow team, there’s no specific proposals as to what it would look like right now, but the councillors have indicated they’d be looking at exempting all Glasgow City residents from the scheme.

Obviously one of the benefits of congestion charging is traffic management. The other is it does raise revenue. Generally that revenue being raised, you can then use to fund better public transport, directly put it in and certainly acts of the Scottish Parliament that have previously created a legal basis for congestion schemes have required that any revenue raise goes to public transport funding.

And so whether or not to exempt resident and which residents, it’s again all the decision about the design of the scheme, and this is what the City Council considering this is in addition to them considering putting a toll on the Clyde tunnel, which would also exempt Glasgow City residents. So whether this is actually about traffic management or if it’s a more pragmatic way to raise revenue from people that are not their own electorate, congestion charges can be quite controversial to introduce.

Certainly when the Edinburgh one failed, it was 74% of people on a 60% turn out in a referendum voting against it, so they can be very unpopular and that would then maybe factor into non economic considerations of who to exempt from a scheme.

00:12:40 Hannah Randolph

Yeah. And I mean, currently the low emission zone is really focused in Glasgow City Centre. Would excluding Glasgow City residents extend beyond that zone?

00:12:52 Josh Hampson

Yeah. What the Councils have indicated is that all resident of the City Council. So the way this would be done is the automatic number plate cameras could recognise where the V5 of the vehicle was registered to and if it’s a residential address within the City Council, that’s effectively 100% discount given to that, the owner of that vehicle. And whereas if you live outwith the city council region, and particularly the way that Glasgow City Council is set up for anyone that’s not local to the area, there’s a lot of suburbs of the city that are outwith the city council’s boundary and particularly a lot more affluent suburbs, so it would start to pull money in from any of, any commuters or visitors from those areas coming in, particularly in areas such as East Dumbartonshire, North Lanarkshire, South Lanarkshire.

Those people would be liable to a toll, whereas people that are resident of areas such as Jordanhill, Hyndland, Easterhouse, etcetera that are within the City Council boundary wouldn’t.

00:13:46 Hannah Randolph

Yeah. So that potentially still creates quite a lot of people who are exempt from the policy.

And so potentially as you said then that that design sounds like it could be a bit more about raising revenue and less about reducing the flow of cars.

00:14:00 Josh Hampson

I think it’s especially where, just one of the things we’ve seen from London and certainly from Edinburgh, is that the success of these schemes is relying on use of alternative methods.

The people within, residents that live within Glasgow City Council already have the best access to other transport, particularly the suburban rail system and the subway. Compared to the residents that live sort of in the fringes of the city that are outside the City Council boundary.

And so if you’re then exempting the people with the best access to the public transport, it can be a bit more difficult to justify that on an economic basis.

00:14:37 Hannah Randolph

Yeah, that makes sense. Because yeah, I can certainly think of a lot of people who would support this kind of thing, particularly if it meant, you know, extending the subway hours or something like that, but those are also people who don’t drive very much anyway.

00:14:52 Josh Hampson

Yeah, exactly. And the Clyde tunnel toll, this is another idea that the City Council wants, that the City Council is proposing. There seems to be an ongoing debate where the Clyde Tunnel is managed as a local road, so Glasgow City Council is responsible for it. Previous Council administrations have wanted this to be taken over as a trunk road and so would be centrally managed by Transport Scotland and the Scottish Government. The City Council’s argument would be that they receive the same amount of funding on sort of a per-kilometer basis for the Clyde tunnel that they do for any other street, but it’s obviously a much more expensive piece of infrastructure to maintain. It’s not as if the City Council is responsible for managing Kingston Bridge, that’s a trunk road.

Eastern Dumbartonshire and Renfrewshire councils are not responsible for the Erskine Bridge either. That’s a trunk road. And so the toll on non City Council residents for the tunnel I think is less about managing traffic through the tunnel and more about the city trying to make up the shortfall in finances. And and I could understand the fairness argument there being that City Council residents already pay for the tunnel through council tax. Anyone that lives outwith the city but still uses the tunnel in that regard doesn’t. But with the city centre congestion charge, which is the boundary based one, I think it becomes a lot more, it’s difficult to see the justification for why you wouldn’t want City Council residents, certainly city centre residents, there could be the argument for exempting them, but not necessarily City Council residents.

00:16:24 Hannah Randolph

Yeah, that makes sense. And you’ve mentioned several other cities that have this type of congestion charging, so we’ve got, you know, London’s got something, New York’s got something, there’s something proposed in Edinburgh.

Maybe we’ll start with that last one. So what was proposed in Edinburgh and why did it – why wasn’t it put in place?

00:16:43 Josh Hampson

So the Edinburgh one was proposed in 2005 and it was part of a wider scheme at the time where Edinburgh trams were being considered as well, with, sort of, Edinburgh had had its trams decommissioned in the 50s, 60s and they were looking at rebuilding them. Eventually that’s happened or the version of it.

And so it was an act of Scottish Parliament in 2001, that enabled Scottish cities to establish either single or dual cordon boundaries. So single cordon would be just the city centre. The dual cordon would be like I explained with Edinburgh, the city centre and then extending out to the ring road. And the exact charging scheme and operating of it was, I think, was left down to the local authorities to decide.

They’d planned for it to raise, I think about £760 million over 20 years was their forecast. The issue was at the time, Edinburgh’s public transport was almost entirely run by Lothian Buses and a few others, mainly the train into Waverly and Haymarket. The smaller stations around Edinburgh don’t see sort of the same level of service you would expect from, say, like a traditional metro system. And so there was a lot of opposition to it, particularly from businesses who – businesses tend to be a group that’s very much opposed to any sort of road charge pricing. We see it in Glasgow. There was a debate recently over whether or not parking times should be extended. Right now, parking charges end at six in the city centre. Whether they should be extended to 10 or not. Businesses and particularly organisations that represent businesses made a big push against that because they feel it will dissuade their customers from using city centre businesses and encourage them to out of town retail parks instead.

00:18:23 Hannah Randolph

Yeah.

00:18:24 Josh Hampson

With the parking – and so there’s a lot of opposition to it. Ultimately there was a referendum that was done by postal ballot in February 2005 that, as I said, there was 74% of votes cast against the system. I think particularly as well, there were suspicions over, is this about traffic management or is it just a way to raise revenue? People are basically cynical about motives.

And so whilst it could have been a way to raise money to allocate towards Edinburgh tram systems – the original proposals was for three tram lines – right now there’s only one, there have been about half a dozen park-and-rides that have been installed as well. So that anyone that did need to drive into the city from, say, a rural area would be able to park outside, bus in and back.

Cambridge certainly operates a couple of those as a way to keep visitors out of the ring road rather than coming all the way in and taking up space parking.

And so ultimately, it failed. There was at the time a lot of parties campaigned against it. Certainly the SNP who were at the time in opposition, and then they just came into government, were big opponents of the Edinburgh scheme.

And this is the interesting thing about this, is Glasgow City Council are considering this, Transport Scotland have indicated that they would be supportive of the scheme as well, in both Glasgow and Edinburgh, which is really a big change because the Scottish Government has historically been very hostile to road charging systems. In 2008, they abolished all toll roads in Scotland, certainly with the design of the low emission zones in Scotland being prohibitions rather than pay to pollute – rather than a pay to pollute option. And the Scottish Government now suggesting that it would back congestion charge marks a shift in transport policy from them.

00:20:08 Hannah Randolph

Interesting. And so is that something that’s been happening elsewhere in the UK as well? So obviously, London’s got something ,you’ve mentioned a couple different things elsewhere in England. Is that congestion charging?

00:20:21 Josh Hampson

No, that’s just the park and ride system, so it’s in Cambridge. It’s free to park, you pay the bus fare to get in, and the idea is the bus fare is cheaper than what city centre parking would be. And so from a rational perspective, it makes sense to park miles out of the city and catch the bus in.

London is the only major boundary based congestion charge in the UK. Durham does have one, but it’s only really one street to avoid people driving directly to – I think it’s either the castle or the cathedral. It’s to the landmarks to encourage parking slightly further away from that. But London is the only major example of a boundary-based congestion charge in the UK.

And that was sort of introduced in 2003 and then it’s mostly been successful. There was a western extension that was introduced in 2007 covering the West End that was failed and ultimately appealed in 2011 and said previously that alternative modes of transport are a key to success. Another one is having sensible boundaries. So with city centres you can normally pick a road that is the boundary of where the city centre ends. And the issue of the London West End one is that there was no obvious end to where the West End was. And so there’s then this really complex scheme of exemptions, people getting like 90%, 70% percent, 80% discounts based on how close or far away they live to the boundary.

00:21:43 Hannah Randolph

And do you think that there’s still something that we can learn from cities outside the UK in terms of how a policy might work or what we might expect to happen? Or are the cities too different?

00:21:53 Josh Hampson

I think generally you see overall similar results when you introduce the congestion charge, the number of vehicles entering the zone before and after will fall. New York’s only had theirs for about 7 months now. It came into effect in January, and it’s only been, enforcement has only really been since March for sort of late payment etc.

But nevertheless, sort of early findings, and I was having a look at an NBER working paper earlier, suggest that sort of average speeds within New York Central business district, which is the zone that they’re charging, have increased by 15%. Travel times also tend to decrease as well. And where this has been particularly noticeable in New York is, because it’s the southern half of Manhattan that’s charged for the congestion charge there, their travel times through the tunnels and bridges over the Hudson River have dramatically fallen during rush hours following the introduction of the charge, because more and more people are now using the subway. But then New York does have a very effective subway service, it’s able to carry people in and out of the city, both from Long Island, boroughs such as Queens and Brooklyn, and then also from the outside of the Hudson, from New Jersey, and so, driving isn’t necessarily the only system there.

And certainly I think such a severe reaction to, to road users in New York to a $9 fee is because a $9 fee is so much less to New Yorkers than what the £15 fee is in London would suggest that it was a case of convenience and people driving because it was more convenient. Not necessarily because driving was an affordable option, but not, it wasn’t substantially more affordable than what the MTA subway was.

00:23:39 Hannah Randolph

Yeah, ok. And is your sense that, in Glasgow, that the alternative transport options are sufficient, that this would be effective?

00:23:48 Josh Hampson

I think it’s difficult to say, Glasgow certainly, it has probably the second best rail transport in the UK after London. And OK, there’s a running joke that the subway’s only been one line since 1894, or whenever it was opened.

But when you consider the suburban railways with the south side lines and the low level north of the river, there are quite a few rail lines there. The issue is just because it’s second best, the gap between Glasgow and London is so severe that the frequency of the trains and the reliability of the train isn’t anywhere near what London’s is.

Certainly something in recent years London started doing as well is building a lot, significantly more bicycle infrastructure, separate bicycle lanes rather than them sharing the same motor space as cars which has led to a noticeable increase in cyclists, similar thing can be seen in Paris as well.

And so whether or not Glasgow’s transport is effective, you know, my inclination as a Glaswegian is, probably not, and this is part of the reason why the Edinburgh one failed is that although there were plans to invest the revenues from the congestion charging scheme into public transport improvements, those investments would have happened after the charge had been effected.

And that would be the issue potentially with the Glasgow one. However, with it covering just the city centre, there might also be enough multi-storey car parks on the edge of the city centre that you don’t necessarily need to park on-street, there’s enough capacity that you can park basically on the edge of the city and then walk in which would still, it would address all the pollution concerns. You have the noise pollution, the physically air pollution as well, and it would allow a lot more street space to be allocated to away from on street parking and instead, during the summer months, businesses have been able to open sort of a la carte dining. And there’s certainly lots of schemes like that that you would have saw during the pandemic when people weren’t driving and using parking spots, it could free up economic gains in that way.

00:25:48 Hannah Randolph

OK, so there are some maybe slightly smaller scale things that, that could be taken into consideration and put in place that would kind of help. And it sounds like the, in terms of public attitudes, part of it is making people feel that there are sufficient alternatives and that those alternatives work for them, yeah.

00:26:08 Josh Hampson

There is an interesting thing with the public attitudes, is that generally, opposition to these schemes is a lot more severe before their introduction and then when people sort of live with them and interact with them and see the benefits, because they are actually very effective at reducing congestion, they tend to become a lot more supportive and so it’s sort of, like, the idea of the change or the charge is actually worse than the charge itself, and certainly that’s been observed in London. That after the charge, much more people became supportive of the scheme than there were before its introduction.

00:26:43 Hannah Randolph

Yeah, there’s – it seems like there would be something around short term versus longer term. In the short term, if you have a car already and this might change how you’re approaching things, but if then the money gets put back into transport infrastructure it may feel like you no longer need a car or you’re not used to using it as often. And so you’re more comfortable with it. So – something along those lines. Thank you. Thank you, Josh, for joining me today. You can look on our website fraserofallander.org to see more about different transport policies coming up and particularly in the autumn, we are looking forward to the end of peak fares.

00:27:19 Josh Hampson

Yes, I’ll definitely do a piece on that, peak fares are, they’re the same principle that undermines congestion charging that also underpins peak fares.

00:27:28 Hannah Randolph

Perfect. So look out for that on our website and until next time on the Fraser of Allander podcast, we’ll see you then.