Trond Andresen
Sydney's car pollution problem -- a proposal ===============================
I am a Norwegian control systems engineer on a one year sabbatical in Sydney, and have been here for four months now. It seems to me that Sydney has a big car traffic problem, while not yet on the level of London and Mexico City.
In Norway there is now discussion of rationing of the right to drive in cities. The technology is available, and up and running already in a couple of Norwegian cities. While it is currently used for road pricing (collecting money for new motorways around and into large cities), plans are under way to employ these systems to reduce car traffic in urban areas.
Such a system will work like this: Every vehicle is required to have an electronic chip on the windscreen, containing a number of points representing a corresponding "city environment consumption quota". Small HF radio frequency antennae with associated microcomputers are mounted above streets: several hundred in a city (probably thousands in megacities), and in a denser pattern the nearer the city centre. Every time a car passes under such an antenna, one or more points are ticked off the chip on the windscreen. If the chip is empty, the driver has to buy new points. Driving without a valid chip under an antenna results in being video-photographed and fined. A given city may each year have a total quota for sale or rationing to the population, and people may sell points to each other. Public transportation, police, etc. are of course exempted. Such a system will effectively induce a new type of behaviour in drivers, where they learn how to plan so that neccessary activities are still realized, BUT WITH FEWER CAR TRIPS.
I am perfectly aware that this will not be popular among a lot of motorists. But it is difficult to argue against, since urban environment (consisting of among other things the freedom from pollution, noise, congestion) obviously is what economists term "a scarce resource". We are f.inst. not allowed to call long distance or use elecricity without paying proportionally with our consumption of these resources. Everyone accepts this. The only fundamental obstacle until now for treating the scarce resource of urban environment in the same manner, has been the absence of the technology to measure -- and bill people for -- such consumption. When that possibility has arrived, the natural question is: why shall not consumption of urban environment by motorists be controlled through purchase of quotas, just as most other consumption of scarce resources is controlled in a market economy?