Vidi kôd stranice Economist singaporeroadpricing.html

<font size=3> '''Where economics stops short (Survey 5 of 6)''' </font>
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'''Transport|road pricing, practical and theoretical problems; Roads|pricing, practical and theoretical problems; Cars and trucks|road pricing, practical and theoretical problems; Economics|road pricing, practical and theoretical problems; <BR>
'''5-Sep-98''' <BR>
Charging drivers for the congestion they cause, which this newspaper has often advocated, is not as simple as it sounds. AT 8.30 on a weekday morning, the traffic creeps along Scotts Road. Cars, taxis, buses queue patiently at each traffic light and then ease forward a few metres, only to stop again. In front of the hotels, besuited businessmen, already sweating in the tropical heat, wait for empty cabs that are nowhere to be found. The scene has none of the urban chaos of Sao Paulo or even San Francisco; in Singapore, drivers dare not sound their horns, and no vendors dart among the cars. But let it be noted: Singapore, without doubt, has traffic jams. 
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That will not surprise Singaporeans, but for city planners and transport economists it should be a mite unsettling. More than any other city, Singapore has put economic thinking to use in order to control congestion. An array of measures has made it costly to buy a car, own a car, drive a car, park a car and take a car into central Singapore. At the same time, the government has invested heavily in public transport and, yes, in roadbuilding. All of this has turned the tiny island-state into a laboratory for testing economic approaches to traffic management. Its ideas are being emulated, in different ways, in places as diverse as Stockholm, Edinburgh and San Diego. America’s Department of Transportation endorses “congestion pricing”, and so do authorities across Europe. But if there is one thing Singapore’s experiments have proved, it is that economics is no panacea for traffic problems. 
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More than most governments, Singapore’s has sought to make the case against congestion in economic terms. There is no attempt physically to restrict the use of cars anywhere on the island. Nor, unlike in much of Europe, is there a chorus of public officials and environmental activists who deplore driving as an anti-social activity. “I’ve got nothing against cars,” says Mah Bow Tan, the minister responsible for transport. “It’s perfectly okay to dream about having a car.” The issue, Singaporeans are constantly told, is not that driving is bad, but that driving creates social costs. So long as motorists pay the full social cost of their driving, says Mr Mah, they can drive as much as they want. 
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For all its remarkable reputation, the government has not been uniformly successful with its anti-congestion policies. Initially, in 1972, it tried to limit traffic by making cars more expensive. It raised the vehicle import duty from 30% to 45%, and hit car-buyers with an additional registration fee equal to 25% of the car’s market value. The results were not encouraging. Traffic moved no faster, but the higher price of new cars meant that drivers held on to their old bangers instead of replacing them. 
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The first direct vehicle-control scheme came in 1975, when drivers were required to buy a licence to enter the central area during the morning rush. The charge for a car with fewer than four people in it was set at S$3 ($1.70) a day, the same as a day’s parking at the time, in effect doubling the cost of driving into town. The additional registration fee went up from 25% to 55% of the value of a new car, but buyers were given a break if they scrapped their old cars. Moreover, the annual road tax was doubled, and extra fees were imposed on company cars. Unofficially, the government agreed to tolerate a car-dealers’ cartel to ensure that car prices stayed high. At the same time it committed itself to building new expressways and underground lines. 
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These are the basic policies, modified over two decades, that have earned Singapore such renown as one of the few cities to defeat congestion. Between 1975 and 1991, the speed of traffic in central Singapore during morning peak hours nearly doubled, to 36km per hour, as traffic declined by 45%. 
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The full story, however, is more complex. What was defeated was not congestion in general, but congestion in a tiny geographic area between 7.30 and 9.30am. Just outside the controlled zone, on streets such as Scotts Road, traffic jams worsened as drivers sought routes they could use without paying. On roads into the centre, the drop in peak-hour traffic was matched by a big increase just before 7.30 and after 9.30. 
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The new policies also imposed some other costs. One was borne by people who had previously used the bus, and whose trips now took longer as former car commuters clambered aboard to avoid the congestion charge. A second was paid by all Singaporeans. Several economic studies showed that because the licensing fee was so high, city-centre streets were in fact underused at rush hour, allowing a valuable resource—road space—to go to waste. The inefficiency of too much traffic had been replaced by the inefficiency of too little. 
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Singapore’s market-based policies also incurred yet another, quite unintended, social cost. The tax break for scrapping a used car had been set as a percentage of the price of the new one replacing it. Astute Singaporeans quickly spotted an arbitrage opportunity: they could buy a cheap and highly polluting import, such as a Russian-made Lada, drive it for a year or two, scrap it when purchasing a Mercedes, and receive a tax rebate that more than paid for the Lada. The country’s car fleet became less safe, and less clean, than it would have been without all the tax measures.
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<font size=3> '''Try, try again''' </font>
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Undeterred, the government kept on tinkering. Road taxes and car-park fees at public-housing estates, where most Singaporeans live, were raised in 1988. Petrol taxes were hiked as well, and from June 1989 licences were introduced for driving into the central area during the evening rush as well as in the morning. In 1990 a quota for new cars was established. The government would decide how many vehicles the country should have, and issue only enough ownership certificates to keep the vehicle fleet at the desired size. A motorist who wanted to buy a new car would have to bid for a ten-year certificate at a monthly auction. 
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The quotas quickly became the country’s most sensitive political issue. At first, car dealers bought up the certificates at auction, prompting public complaints that they were trying to corner the quota market. And why, Singaporeans asked, should people have to pay so much for cars that might be used only at times when the roads were not congested? The government cracked down on the resale of certificates, and offered big discounts on taxes and import duties if a car buyer agreed to drive only in the evenings and at weekends. 
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Again, the market outsmarted the technocrats. Instead of speculating in certificates directly, car dealers began using proxies who would bid for a certificate at auction, use it to buy a car and instantly resell both, at a mark-up, to a retail buyer. And the “weekend-car scheme”, instead of helping average families, gave windfalls to buyers of luxury vehicles who discovered that it was cheaper to buy a tax-favoured weekend car and pay penalties for driving it during the working week than to bid for a regular certificate of ownership. 
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This year the government has taken its anti-congestion measures to a level more advanced than anywhere else in the world. Every car in Singapore now has a small transponder installed just behind the windscreen, designed to hold the driver’s pre-paid cash card. Since April, motorists using the East Coast Parkway in the morning rush are debited with a toll as they pass beneath electronic gantries: S$2 between 8am and 9am and S$1 just before and after the peak period. The rest of the day is free. A similar scheme took effect in the central business district on September 1st, replacing monthly licences with tolls that can vary by day and time. According to A.P.G. Menon, head of the Land Transport Authority, which oversees the programme, the tolls have been set to produce average speeds on downtown streets of around 50km per hour. 
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And what has all this accomplished? Traffic moves freely on the motorways and in the city centre. About 60% of trips to work are made on public transport, many of them on two underground lines planned with immense care to make sure they keep running come what may. Even the potential for delays caused by patrons leaping in front of trains has been obviated by glass walls along the platform edges. Lorries serving the island’s industrial zones can make pick-ups and deliveries without delay, keeping costs down. Because no one can own a car without having a place to park it, Singapore, almost alone among big Asian cities, is not totally choked by cars. By these criteria, market-based anti-congestion policies have been a roaring success. 
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Yet they still have unintended side-effects. For example, they waste energy. Why? Once a would-be motorist has paid out a small fortune for a certificate of entitlement, the extra cost of buying a luxury car rather than a compact hardly matters, so Singaporeans have developed a taste for big Mercedes limousines. And they drive everywhere: on an island that measures barely 35km east to west and 20km north to south, the average car, using some of the world’s most expensive petrol, clocks up 20,000km a year—much the same as in America. The reason is not far to seek. “You have paid so much. If you don’t use it, your average cost per trip goes up,” says Phang Sock-Yong, an economist at the National University of Singapore, who worked out last year that a Mercedes E 200, valued at about $35,000 before fees and taxes, would cost a Singaporean buyer a whopping $180,000. 
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In other words, the relationship between the fixed cost of keeping a car and the marginal cost of a few miles’ drive is out of whack. This blunts the effectiveness of congestion pricing. Anthony Chin, a dean at the National University, surveyed 200 drivers after the government imposed time-of-day pricing on the expressways earlier this year, and found that very few had changed their behaviour. What the government needs to do, he suggests, is to lower the fixed cost of ownership, so that the marginal cost—the tab for fuel, parking and congestion charges each time the car is driven—weighs more heavily in drivers’ minds.
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But this the government cannot do. Hundreds of thousands of people have bought cars with bank loans secured by the vehicles. Anything that would cut the price of new cars, such as slashing import duties or reducing the additional registration fee, would lower the value of used cars and might make owners default on their loans. Besides, as Mr Chin points out, the various taxes on motoring account for nearly a quarter of total government revenue . Making car ownership cheaper might be economically more efficient, but the option is no longer open. Taxing the car, originally a virtue, has become an addiction.