Use road pricing to fund infrastructure, says ICE

The government should introduce a road usage toll to fund infrastructure development and cut carbon emissions, a report from the Institution of Civil Engineers has concluded.

It said users should be charged more to use the road at peak times to stop congestion, where the stopping and starting of cars increases their carbon emissions.

The report found that population growth, which is predicted to be as high as 20% in some areas over the next 20 years, would mean the government needed to manage demand for infrastructure. “We cannot build our way out of the problem,” said the report.

Professor Stephen Glaister, director of the RAC Foundation, which contributed to the report, said: “We are trying to find ways of giving an incentive to move people away from using the roads at peak times to other times. That will reduce congestion, emissions and will help reduce the loss to fuel duty revenue from increased levels of electric car usage.”

But he added that that road users were only likely to accept such a charging system if the money was ploughed back into improving infrastructure.

Glaister said road users may eventually be forced to book a slot to travel on the roads as a means of managing the network’s capacity.

The ICE report said charging systems had already been successful in changing behaviour in areas such as waste recycling, where the introduction of landfill tax and changes to local authority collection regimes has increased recycling rates.